In Episode 141 of The Last Dinosaur, Christopher Aversano sits down with Emma Collier, Founder of Further Ventures, to explore the future of AI in shipping, digital transformation, leadership, and innovation. Together, they discuss why successful AI adoption depends less on technology than on change management, accountability, domain expertise, continuous learning, and developing the people who will lead maritime’s next transformation.
Topics: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Maritime Innovation, Digital Transformation, Shipping Technology, Leadership, Change Management, Posidonia 2026, Further Ventures, Maritime Strategy
Artificial intelligence is dominating the conversation across maritime, but how do we move beyond pilots, hype, and headlines to create lasting change?
Why this conversation matters
Fresh from the inaugural Further Ventures symposium held ahead of Posidonia 2026, Emma shares the ideas that challenged conventional thinking, from treating AI as a strategic hire rather than another software tool to preparing maritime professionals for a future where continuous learning, human judgment, and domain expertise become competitive advantages.
Whether you’re a shipowner, operator, technology provider, investor, or simply interested in where maritime is heading, this conversation offers practical insight into one of the industry’s most important transitions.
| “AI finally makes the one-on-one tutor accessible and affordable, so we could increasingly start to change manage ourselves as an industry. This should apply both onshore and to seafarers, though their current circumstances rarely allow the time or headspace for it. How this could shift is something our rooms will explore.” Emma Collier |
Episode Timeline
| Time | Topic |
| 02:25 | Emma’s journey into maritime and Greece |
| 05:15 | Why she founded Further Ventures |
| 08:05 | Inside the first Further Ventures symposium |
| 11:30 | Why AI should be treated like a strategic hire |
| 14:50 | Change management and the human element |
| 19:05 | Continuous learning and AI-enabled education |
| 21:45 | The future skills maritime leaders will need |
| 26:30 | Where Further Ventures goes next |
| 30:25 | Emma’s recommended reading |
Episode Transcript
Christopher Aversano: Welcome, everyone. You are listening to The Last Dinosaur, and I’m your host, Chris Aversano. This is the podcast where we explore the evolving maritime landscape and hear from the innovators leading the charge.
Today, I’m pleased to be joined by Emma Collier. Emma is the founder of Further Ventures and recently hosted a major symposium ahead of Posidonia that brought together leaders from shipping, technology, investment, and policy to discuss one of the biggest questions facing the industry today: How do we move beyond the AI hype and into meaningful transformation?
In this conversation, we’re going to explore the lessons from that event, what Emma is seeing across the maritime innovation ecosystem, and where she believes the next opportunities are emerging.
This episode also marks the halfway point in the year as we take our first-ever break from podcasting. If you’ve been following along, I’ve produced at least one podcast every other week for more than four years. You won’t hear from me again until September, but we’ll come back tan, rested, and ready, hopefully with some exciting guests.
Emma, welcome to the podcast.
Emma Collier: Thanks so much for having me, Chris. This has been a long time coming, so I’m really excited to be here.
Chris: We’re excited to have you. For those who may not know, Emma has hosted a podcast on and off over the past year, and I was a guest. That was part of the reason we thought it would be great to connect again on The Last Dinosaur.
Before we get going, how did you get into maritime, and particularly maritime in Greece? That is where you are based, which I think is fascinating.
Emma: I’m originally from the United States and was mostly based in San Francisco, but I’ve now been in Greece for almost ten years and in shipping for about five.
Greece had been on the horizon for me since I was a child. I don’t have any roots here, but I remember my grandparents giving me a book of mythology and having this immediate, strange sense of déjà vu. I felt as though I had been born in the wrong place and needed to get here as soon as I could. The feeling never faded, so eventually I decided to trust it.
Maritime turned out to be a large part of that, which I could not have anticipated. Like many people, my entry was this lovely, addictive accident. I was brought in to consult on a new brand whose concept was to tokenize what was billed as the first maritime asset, an LNG carrier. They wanted someone from outside maritime who could look at the idea without inherited assumptions.
I was attracted to the potential benefits: more precise investment exposure, fewer intermediaries, and access to deal flow that investors would not normally see. I could also see how it might appeal both to younger, digitally native investors and to more traditional investors if positioned correctly.
One important part of the work was placing terminology such as distributed ledger technology and tokenization where it belonged, as infrastructure mechanics rather than headlines. That evolved into a full-time role helping to build EVIDENT, the technology company backed by George Economou, where I led global partnerships. EVIDENT ultimately expanded into other verticals, including renewable energy and art, but I was quietly hooked on what this model could offer maritime if it were executed properly at scale.
What I loved most was translating technology into the right framing: finding a recognizable story for the people who could benefit from it but might otherwise overlook it. That is more or less what I have been doing in maritime ever since.
Chris: That is a very interesting route into the industry. In Greece, and around the world, many people have a family history in shipping. Coming in from the outside gives you a different perspective, and it brings us full circle to what you are doing with your company today.
Talk about your pivot into a think tank. We do not see many think tanks focused specifically on digitalization or transformation in maritime. The maritime think tanks that do exist are often more closely associated with defense or security. How did you arrive at Further Ventures and the path you are now taking?
Emma: When I first entered maritime, I was hungry to understand how the industry thought through problems and how different segments were approaching digitalization. I did what most people do and began attending a lot of conferences.
What I learned quickly was that the conventional conference model does not allow for much participatory exchange between attendees and panelists. Q&A sessions are often shortened or cut entirely. I understand the time constraints and other factors behind that, but we lose a great deal of value. You often learn the most in the moments that are not orchestrated, when an idea unfolds in response to whatever happens to come up in the room.
I have a background in corporate events, from the bespoke to the grandiose and everything in between. One thing I have always carried forward is that changing the format changes the spectrum of possible outcomes. It changes how engaged the audience is and what people retain.
I realized that what I wanted was something closer to a symposium, where I could challenge and evolve my own perspective as part of the conversation. Over time, enough people asked me where they could go to learn about AI and digitalization in that kind of setting. Apparently, I was not the only one looking for it, and I had nothing to recommend. Eventually I thought, all right, let’s create it.
Further Ventures is an unscripted, unfiltered, and uncensored think tank-style initiative for maritime leadership to engage with AI and digitalization. It is much closer to an intellectual cage fight than a conventional panel. The exchange is entrepreneur to entrepreneur, because that is what we all are.
I think many of us still have not had our caveman-meets-fire moment with AI, the experience that leaves you awestruck and ends your argument against its potential. We should remember that our first encounter with fire also came with singed eyebrows and burned villages. It took us time to move from burning things down to cooking with it.
We are back in the experimentation mode that has always defined us as a species. The point of these sessions is to stress-test your experimental thinking before you trust it to shape a decision with real consequences.
Chris: Your first symposium took place just ahead of Posidonia. How was it received? Do you think it began to close some of the gap between playing with fire, getting your eyebrows singed, and genuinely understanding AI’s capabilities?
The central question was, “Who owns the consequences of an AI-influenced decision?” How did you arrive at that question, and what was the overall atmosphere in the room?
Emma: It is a question that very few people can answer easily right now. There is a clear need to begin sorting through it ourselves rather than waiting for someone to hand us an answer.
The timing was ideal for a first session because it coincided with the end of Panathēnea, just as Posidonia began. Panathēnea is a very interesting reimagining of the ancient Greek festival, bringing together technology, art, and startup ecosystems so that they can engage with and inspire one another. I wanted to use that opportunity to test the format, especially because it attracts investors and principals from other industries. The more opportunities maritime has to engage with innovation in other sectors, the better.
We launched at the beginning of the Posidonia marathon, when time is everyone’s scarcest resource. The fact that we had a full house of commercial shipping operators was all the proof I needed that the appetite is real.
One aspect that resonated strongly was changing some of the mental models we use to understand AI. Two reframes I have developed are particularly useful. The first is to think of AI as a strategic hire rather than a tool. The second is that the domain owner should act as AI’s hiring manager and take responsibility for it.
Calling AI a tool carries assumptions about how tools behave. Tools do the same thing every time and fail visibly when they break. The word suggests something static and predictable. That does not fit a system that is probabilistic, context-sensitive, and capable of degrading silently.
Think about why you hire someone in the first place. You want something done better than it is currently being done. That is also why we want AI. A hire has a defined scope of authority, is onboarded into a specific workflow, and earns trust through results. Access increases only as confidence grows. Someone remains accountable for what that hire produces throughout the relationship.
Looking at AI as a hire helps close the accountability gap we keep stepping around. When AI is treated as a tool, no one is responsible for its behavior over time because tools are not assumed to have behavior over time.
This is where the management role becomes very interesting. We now have a strange new team member that can be extraordinarily capable, sometimes incredible, and at other times merely truth-shaped. It may sound equally confident either way. How do you socialize it within a team? What does a performance review look like? How do you fire an AI?
The domain owner needs to be able to answer those questions, monitor the system’s work, intervene when something is wrong, and own the consequences when either the person or the AI gets it wrong.
These are frameworks people already understand. They know what it means to hire someone, monitor performance, set expectations, and terminate a working relationship. That makes AI feel more familiar, rather than like a foreign, exotic creature operating in a reality far removed from our own.
Chris: We see this challenge often in shipping, and that challenge is change management. We will return to it in a moment, but was there anything about the symposium that surprised you?
Perhaps it was simply the willingness of so many people to gather in one room and discuss this when, as you said, time was everyone’s most precious commodity. Was there a topic or moment that came close to creating an “aha” moment and shaping the discussion?
Emma: There were several.
We were fortunate to hold the event under the auspices of the Hellenic Chamber of Shipping. George Alexandratos, the Chamber’s president, came to give opening remarks, alongside Costis Frangoulis, President of the International Propeller Club, and Akis Tsirigakis, Founder and CEO of Stellar V Capital Corp. It was significant that they came, but what surprised and delighted me was that all three stayed well into the discussion, despite everything competing for their time at the very beginning of Posidonia.
I think one reason was that people genuinely respond to the discomfort created by friction. The room was shocked at times, but usefully shocked. That allowed strong, uncensored positions to surface. There was no one to please, so people had to decide in real time what they thought and how much of their hand they were willing to show.
One of my partners at Further Ventures, Mike Konstantinidis, said very bluntly that the role of the software developer was over. His delivery was essentially: “Sorry, don’t shoot the messenger. The job is finished. It is all part of the disruption. Moving on.”
Someone’s hand immediately shot up. He said, “I have just hired a group of software developers, so perhaps we should speak afterwards and you can help me decide how many of them to keep.”
There was humor in the exchange, but you knew he was serious. Many people loudly disagreed with Mike, including me, although I was quieter about it. I think there may be an entire emerging field for software developers who clean up vibe-coded disasters.
The value of Mike’s intervention was its bluntness. Had he meandered through every nuance of how the profession might survive or change, he could have spent a long time saying something nobody noticed.
That is part of the think tank’s value. Maritime leaders, and leaders generally, do not tend to pre-negotiate their conviction before they speak or temper an intense reaction. They respond to clarity and friction. That is when they sit up, pay attention, and engage.
Throughout Posidonia week, people kept coming up to me asking, “What happened in there?” They had the energy of people ready to have another go immediately, almost flash-mob style, if I had been willing to corral a few people. Ultimately, they wanted to know when we would do the next one.
Chris: One of the themes you touched on earlier was change management. It has been central to digitalization throughout the time I have hosted this podcast, although the practice itself goes back decades.
I remember dealing with change management when I was part of the team introducing ISO and ISM within the Mobil U.S.-flag fleet. It was change management in a different costume.
Change management always has a human dimension. In the discussions leading up to the symposium, during the event, and in the conversations that followed at Posidonia, where did the human element sit?
I am thinking both about shoreside personnel who have to implement and work with these systems, and about seafarers. They may not be part of the initial conversation, but they will often be affected by its outcome and asked to carry out work shaped by AI-enabled decisions. AI may be gathering the information, influencing the decision, or forming part of the process. What did the room say, and what came up in the conversations that followed?
Emma: One profound effect AI can have on change management is that it finally makes the one-to-one tutor affordable and accessible. Increasingly, we do not have to wait for someone else to make a technology understandable to us. We can change-manage ourselves because the system can distill complexity into familiar concepts, in the form we need and in relation to the requirements of our role, provided we are inclined to engage with it.
Part of the conversation was therefore about how we create space for that inclination. How do we increase motivation? How do we make this a real priority that people can move toward, rather than something that still feels like a nice-to-have?
One of the main reasons AI pilots fail is that people do not know how to use them, do not want to use them, or quietly sabotage them. Without change management, without someone championing why a system is being introduced, and without space for people to develop their own motivation and access, they may conclude that they are being asked to engineer their own replacement.
Different roles across the industry require different approaches to change management. That is part of what we are building into the membership model. Even when someone cannot attend a live session, the intelligence from the room can be distilled and made available in personalized forms. People could engage through voice conversations, generated podcasts, explainer videos, and other formats tailored to their role, level, and starting point.
Over time, we intend to add more adaptive learning features so the system can better understand how an individual learns and thinks, in relation to the decisions, risks, and responsibilities they actually carry.
As roles continue to change, a domain owner could use this to study material directly related to the decisions for which they are accountable, in the format that works best for them. Someone considering a different path could explore where they are strongest and how those strengths might map onto new opportunities as roles evolve.
That creates agility and, importantly, agency. Agency is becoming a core part of change management. Without it, change feels like something being done to you. With it, the process becomes part of your own development and an extension of the expertise you already bring.
Chris: Is that the direction in which you are taking the think tank? Will it become, in part, a platform for managing change?
You have had a successful first event and started discussions that matter to the industry. What comes next? Is it another symposium, a broader buildout, or something else?
The concept occupies a distinctive space. We have venture studios, private equity, and private investors, but those are primarily concerned with investment. You are creating something closer to a protected space for exchanging and testing ideas. What are you considering for future gatherings?
Emma: We want to hold several live sessions each year, perhaps five or six. Behind those sessions, we want to build out a membership model that takes the intelligence produced by the room and synthesizes it within a consistent framework.
Members would then have the opportunity to spar with that intelligence, continue engaging with it, and build their own digital fluency in whatever way works best for them.
Every individual journey of experimentation needs a place free from an audience and from judgment about what we did not understand or did not know. The platform should give people the privacy to keep asking for an explanation in a different way until it makes sense.
I also like the idea that someone might have to argue a position against different simulated perspectives. That would allow them to practice negotiation while strengthening their fluency, whether they are in the privacy of their office, at home, on a bus, or anywhere else.
It could help wherever someone needs to examine how they are making a decision and why they are saying yes or no.
Chris: It sounds as though you are moving toward an agent specifically tailored to change management.
Emma: Yes. I love the idea of change-managing ourselves because that is increasingly the role we are moving into.
AI can now act as a personal tutor for almost anything, and you can choose how you learn. You have to be willing to engage and become comfortable with the process, but once you do, it can present information in the way you are most likely to absorb it.
That is a significant strength because it is very difficult to lead people through changes that you are still figuring out yourself. How do you provide stability and confidence when you do not yet have the answers or the fluency?
That lack of fluency is one of the largest obstacles when we ask leaders to guide their teams through change.
Chris: Looking further ahead, what do you see for the next generation entering maritime?
There is a traditional route into the industry. My own story is not based on a family connection, but it is fairly conventional for the United States: I attended a maritime academy, sailed for a while, and then moved ashore.
Then there are people like you, who enter the industry in mid-career through an interesting and unexpected opportunity. What skills will the next generation need? What will established leaders, including people of my generation, need in order to lead colleagues who bring different skill sets into an environment where the ground is shifting?
Emma: My feeling is that we are heading toward a soft-skills renaissance, although I would like to rebrand “soft skills” because I dislike the term and think these capabilities deserve a better name.
I was discussing this with my friend Vasilis Mouyis, Co-founder and Director of Doric Shipbrokers, who was part of our first panel. We were considering what the shipbroker of the future might look like in a world with fewer brokers.
The characteristics we identified will map onto many other roles, which is why the example is useful. We immediately spoke about high emotional intelligence, strong listening skills, eye contact, and being fully present in a conversation rather than scanning the room or fiddling with a phone. We spoke about generalists with enough knowledge across different areas to remain welcome company and keep a conversation moving wherever it leads. We also spoke about reading body language and noticing small tells.
Some people may still regard these as pleasant but nonessential qualities. They will matter more and more as a means of establishing trust while technology continues to seep into our interactions. The question of whether these skills have a tangible payoff will disappear.
Optimistically, if AI can remove some of the workload and distraction that have contributed to the decline of these skills, it may create the conditions for those instincts to return.
The next generation will also need to be comfortable challenging machines as well as humans. That connects to the need to be self-motivated and able to teach yourself what you want or need to learn. This will become increasingly important for remaining relevant, and it will also become an established source of credibility.
Many of the people we currently regard as AI experts are self-taught. They had to figure it out for themselves because there was no one available to teach them. Lifelong learning may be a kind of love language, but it is now becoming a survival skill.
Chris: I agree, particularly on what has traditionally been branded as soft skills.
There was a time when it was easy to say that someone needed to be an engineer, earn an MBA, or acquire a particular technical credential. Those things certainly help, but I think domain expertise will become one of the most valuable assets a person can possess in any industry.
People sometimes say, “You understand maritime.” I do not understand all of maritime. I understand a sliver of it. Ask me about marine insurance and I will say no, thank you. Ask me about potato chips and I can tell you that I drive past them on I-95. That is the extent of my relationship with them.
In maritime, someone can enter a role and gradually become a domain expert by fielding calls from agents, dealing with problems aboard ships, working in design, or doing whatever that particular role requires. Over time, they build credibility. That is where much of the additional value sits, and I do not think AI can replace it.
AI is more likely to take over rote work such as data entry or reformatting a spreadsheet that always arrives in the wrong structure. Those tasks may be resolved quite quickly, allowing people, particularly in our industry, to spend more time making critical decisions.
We have been speaking about change management, and you are positioning Further Ventures within that space. Where do you see it in one or two years? When we have this conversation again, what impact do you hope it will have achieved?
Emma: I would love Further Ventures to become one of the places the industry goes willingly, and perhaps even enthusiastically, to pursue lifelong learning in relation to technology.
Maritime has traditionally been a “yes, but” industry of exceptions. Whenever someone tries to write a playbook for digitalization or adoption, someone asks, “Yes, but what about this situation over here?”
AI gives us an opportunity to log those exceptions so they are not forgotten, organize them so they can be found again, and map where history may not be repeating exactly but is rhyming. How did we work through something similar before? What might the current situation correspond to?
Our live sessions are where those “yes, buts” are vocalized, and each synthesis can record them. One session is a useful moment. Ten may begin to reveal patterns. Twenty, accumulated over several years, could become a longitudinal record of how the industry navigated one of the largest technological shifts in its history.
That includes how we manage transitions such as building the data literacy required to make the better decisions we have been told AI will enable.
This record cannot be reconstructed later. You cannot go back and capture how people thought before they knew what came next. At its best, the think tank will be an archive not only of what the industry learned, but of how it learned.
Chris: That is important, and I am curious to see how it evolves for two reasons.
The first is impact. Maritime is highly siloed, both across the industry and within individual companies. Operations may not tell chartering what is happening. Technical management can operate in its own silo, as can purchasing and other functions. I am interested to see how your model develops in that environment.
The second issue is data sharing and the concern that sharing information may weaken competitive advantage. Maritime is not unique in facing that question, but the industry still has to find the point at which data can be shared without giving away what makes a company distinctive.
AI can now generate insights that were previously difficult or impossible to produce. As a result, many companies are building data moats, keeping data useful for the people who own it, pay for it, or are authorized to access it, rather than making it available to the industry as a whole.
We will be dealing with those questions for some time. Hopefully, Further Ventures can provide a forum for examining them, even when it does not claim to provide a definitive answer.
Chris: To close, I always like to ask what my guests are reading. What is on your nightstand or in your bag as you travel and build the next phase of Further Ventures?
Emma: I am currently reading John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, which I was long overdue to read. It was recently given to me, so I have only just started, but the introduction alone convinced me that it is the right book at the right time.
Technically, it is the log of six weeks in 1940 when Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took a sardine boat down the Gulf of California to collect specimens from the tide pools. More importantly, at least to me, it is about how the two of them thought together, and how their narrative intermingles animals and arguments.
There is a line describing the experience as “bright with sun and wet with sea water … the whole crusted over with exploring thought.” I wrote it down because I loved it.
They also played a game aboard the boat that they called “speculative metaphysics.” They would take one thing they had observed that day and see how far they could think from it, simply for the pleasure of watching where the idea went.
Steinbeck wrote that they worked so closely he often could not remember who had begun a particular line of speculation. The result became a product of both minds and of the process itself.
You might say I recognize the game.
Chris: That is interesting. You may be the first person in more than 140 episodes to bring up Steinbeck, or perhaps any of the modern American masters. I cannot say that with complete certainty, but I think it is mostly true.
Emma, thank you for joining me. This has been an enlightening conversation. We have hosted people from venture studios, private equity, and large companies investing in maritime from both the shipowner and cargo-owner sides. Your work focuses on how all of this is synthesized, how the industry can keep moving forward, and how it might avoid some of the roadblocks it has encountered in the past.
Thank you again for coming on.
Emma: Thanks, Chris. It was a real pleasure.
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