Here below viewers of www.allaboutshipping.co.uk not only in Greece but all over Planet Ocean can read this impromtu special interview to John Faraclas by our Emma Collier, a candidate in Monday’s forthcoming Propeller Club of the US International Port of Piraeus Governors election!
Q: You have been in Athens for ten years as an American. What brought you into Greek shipping, and what kept you here?
I came into Greek shipping – like many others – as a beautiful accident and now there’s nowhere else I can ever imagine myself being. It was through a consulting project around a concept to tokenize the first maritime asset, an LNG carrier. The company was considering building a platform that could attract younger, digitally native investors into shipping and other alternative assets, and they wanted someone from outside maritime to look at the idea without inherited assumptions.
My first instinct was that leading with the language of tokenization would be a mistake. The structure may have involved blockchain, but that was not the part people needed to hear first. What mattered was the benefit: more precise exposure to an asset class they understood, fewer intermediaries, lower minimum ticket sizes, and access to deal flow they would not normally see.
That project turned into a full time Global Partnerships role helping build what became EVIDENT, George Economou’s tech startup. Although we later expanded into other types of alternative assets, including renewable energy, unicorn secondaries, and artwork, I was always most interested in what this could do in maritime if executed properly at scale. Whenever I spoke about what we did with the LNG carrier, people’s eyes lit up and they leaned in. This told me something important.
I have never thought of myself as a tech evangelist. I am much more interested in what technology can offer when it is framed properly, deployed strategically, and made useful to the people who actually have to live with it. That is what kept me in Greek shipping. I found a place where the stakes were real, the skepticism was earned, and the value of translating complexity into something commercially understandable was immediately obvious.
Q: What did EVIDENT teach you about introducing new technology to shipping?
It was the most important lesson I have had in how to introduce something new to a room that has no reason to trust it yet.
The frame is everything. When people heard “blockchain,” they heard “crypto” and then speculation, confusion, risk. If they heard “access to an attractive asset through a more efficient structure,” or the potential of 24/7/365 liquidity, they can begin to evaluate the idea on its merits.
That experience sits behind almost everything I do now. The problem is rarely that maritime people are unwilling to consider something new because at heart they’re all entrepreneurs and that’s what entrepreneurs naturally do. It’s more often that the new thing arrives in the wrong language, from the wrong incentive structure, with the wrong assumptions about what they need to give it the attention it deserves.
Q: You are now working on Further & Further and Further Ventures. What do they actually do?
Further Ventures grew out of Further & Further, which offers AI socialization sessions for two distinct audiences — the commercial shipping industry and early-stage maritime tech startups — because the same noise is eroding value on both sides, just differently.
Further Ventures is a think tank style initiative I launched in partnership with George Xiradakis and the F&F team, focused at present on the question “Who owns the consequences of AI-influenced decisions?”. It offers an unfiltered, unscripted and brand agnostic space for maritime leadership to spar with experienced individuals building in this space on themes around digitalization, AI, investment, governance, geopolitics / geoeconomics, and how the human element is evolving alongside all of it.
We don’t sell answers but provide a format and a room so you manufacture your own conviction and build technological fluency sized to reality.
Q: You opened your first Further Ventures session at the start of Posidonia weekend with this question, “Who owns the consequences of AI-influenced decisions?” Why start there?
This is the core issue for me at present.
A great deal of the AI conversation is still happening at the level of tools, pilots, platforms, and the promise of better decisions. Those things matter, but they do not answer the harder questions. Who defines what good looks like so we know what better is? Where is the system being used? How are we measuring if it’s working or not? Who has the authority to challenge it, override it, or stop it when something looks wrong?
If those answers are unclear, accountability moves away from the people who are supposed to carry it and toward systems they deployed without properly understanding. That is the gap we are trying to bridge.
The reason the question worked in the room is that it respected the intelligence already there. Maritime does not need to be told that accountability matters. This is an industry with a deeply developed first muscle in safety, compliance, operational discipline, and responsibility close to the work. AI requires a second muscle, built the same way, through ownership and practice.
Q: You describe AI as a strategic hire rather than a tool. What do you mean by that?
When you think of something as a tool, you carry a set of assumptions: that it does the same thing every time, that it fails visibly when it breaks, that it is static and predictable. AI does not behave that way. AI has to be managed according to the kind of work it is doing. Once it starts shaping decisions, summarizing evidence, ranking options, recommending actions, or acting inside a workflow, the question is what role it is playing inside the company.
That is why the hiring frame is useful. When you hire someone, you do not only determine whether they seem capable. You define their scope of authority. You decide where they sit in the workflow, who can challenge them, what they are allowed to touch, what they need to escalate, and how their performance will be judged over time. That is the discipline AI needs too.
That is where the domain owner comes in. AI accountability cannot sit with “the business” in the abstract, or with IT by default. It has to sit with the person who owns the workflow where an AI output becomes a decision. In maritime, that could be a technical superintendent, operations manager, commercial director, compliance head, founder and that person needs to be fluent enough to call when a technically plausible answer is operationally wrong and step in. The strategic hire frame and the domain owner frame belong together. One defines the management discipline, and the other defines where that discipline has to live.
Q: Why are you running for the Propeller Club Board of Governors now?
As an American woman who has lived in Greece for ten years – one of the best decisions I ever made – I feel that international character of the Propeller Club very personally. Greece is one of the great centers of maritime decision-making, capital, and operational experience. The US brings a different institutional, technological, and commercial vocabulary. The Propeller Club bridges these worlds naturally, and that is one of the reasons it is so valuable for us as a global industry. The Piraeus chapter is, by membership, the largest Propeller Club in the world with every US Ambassador to Greece serving as its Honorary President. Ambassador Guilfoyle, as we all know, holds that role today and is very active with opening remarks at major Propeller Club events.The AMVER Awards, held here each year with the US Coast Guard, also demonstrate what the best of this relationship can do. In 2025, 193 Greek companies and 1,836 vessels were recognized through AMVER for maritime search and rescue, including 12 operations that saved 97 lives.
That international character matters especially now because the kind of volatility shipping is accustomed to is changing in unfamiliar ways. Much of the digital conversation still treats efficiency as the holy grail, but efficiency logic works best when the environment can be mapped well enough to optimize against. The roughly 10% rise in average sailing distances across the 2020s makes the point plainly: no efficiency algorithm can optimize that away, because the constraint is geopolitical. The point is not to abandon the pursuit of efficiency, but to recognize that what we need more of right now is resilience and the ability to strategically use AI for our benefit plays a role.
We are currently living in a period where the decisions maritime leadership make about AI will compound. The people who develop enough fluency to follow what is happening and vet what they are being sold will be in a very different position over the next few years than the people who delegate that literacy entirely. The goal is not to make everyone an AI expert or data scientist, but to help leaders become better judges of what they are seeing, buying, implementing, and governing.
The Propeller Club is already where serious maritime leadership convenes. For me, this is about making AI sit sensibly alongside everything else maritime leadership already discusses: strategy, risk, people, investment, competitiveness, and responsibility. It should be something we take part in, rather than something happening to us.
What I would like to contribute is a way to bring these conversations more strategically into the rooms we already have, without turning them into another “AI in maritime” panel bolted onto the calendar. The shift I would like to see is mostly one of format: more symposium style exchanges in these areas, where members are not just listening to a presentation but participating in the thinking.
Many of the people who came to the first Further Ventures session are already Propeller Club members. That matters because it shows the appetite for this kind of fluid exchange is already there.
