Peter Jackson has watched shipboard communication change from the inside for close to four decades, and he sees both progress and pressure in how those changes have shaped life at sea.
Seaspan’s Chief Technology Officer joined Safmarine as an engineering cadet in 1988, sailing out of Durban and Cape Town on ships where the link to head office was close to silent. “We would head off and we’d go do the voyage and there was very little communication between us and our head office,” he says. “We would execute the voyage and then come back.”
He left as a chief engineer around 1999, spent two years as a Lloyd’s Register marine surveyor, then joined Seaspan in 2001 and delivered its first three ships from Samsung Heavy Industries. He built and led the newbuilding department that eventually became the Assets and Technology department, and led the decarbonisation strategy behind the group’s first methanol conversion and an LNG dual-fuel programme heading for around 50 ships by 2030.
The arc from telex to Starlink is his own career. What interests him is that the workload did not fall.
The tools arrived, and so did the email
A Seaspan vessel today carries what Jackson calls “a huge stack of applications”, covering navigation, planned maintenance, cyber security and more, with IoT data flowing off the ship continuously. Bandwidth is plentiful and crew can call home.
“Nowadays there’s a huge interaction daily and almost hourly between the vessel and the shore,” he says. Some of that is welcome, because the ships are far more sophisticated than the ones he sailed on. The rest is not.
“There’s too many emails. There’s too much reporting to do and attaching photographs,” he says. “A lot of our crew members’ time on board has been taken up by probably administrative type stuff that they shouldn’t really be doing.”
Asked whether the gains and the costs had cancelled each other out, he did not soften it. “I also remember the time of fax and then we got email, and we’ve gone through these various digital phases, and it’s always said, oh, this is going to make your life a lot more easy, a lot more efficient, and it never does,” he says. “Unless you’re extremely careful it doesn’t improve efficiency on board. In some cases it does the reverse. It just increases workload.”
It is an unusual thing for a fleet CTO to say out loud, and Seaspan is going back through its own processes to find the duplication. “Now we’re re-evaluating everything to see how can we really improve efficiency on board, and make sure that there isn’t double or unnecessary reporting.”
Why AI projects fail before they start
Jackson speaks on AI at the Digital Ship Summit in Athens in October, and his view follows the same logic.
He is candid about the cost. “There’s typically a subscription involved and then you have tokens, so there’s at least two ways you’re going to have to pay.” The question is whether value comes back.
His answer starts a long way from the model. Data governance, cyber security, a suitable data infrastructure, a skilled team, alignment at executive level about what the company is trying to do, and an organisational element that is easy to miss, which is making sure internal teams “aren’t kind of competing and contradicting each other”.
Then comes the part he keeps returning to, how use cases get through the door. “It’s being specific about the business value,” he says. “It always sounds very easy, you’ve got to make a business case on AI, but actually the devil’s in the detail. How can you maybe test it and prove it before you spend all this money?”
He has seen the alternative. “What sometimes happens, one particular leader believes yes, this is going to make such a difference, and they force it through, and it kind of doesn’t follow a proper process, eventually gets built, and it doesn’t deliver the value.”
On why the industry has struggled with AI, he is blunt. “Some just want to go straight to the benefit and think they’re going to get the benefit without putting in all the hard work.”
The same discipline runs through his decarbonisation work. The methanol conversion ran from choosing a series and finding a willing customer, through specifications, design, execution and sea trials, to crew training and a rewrite of shore documentation. “The innovative part is what we should be working on,” he says. “But after that it’s just a grind of detailed planning and analysis and risk management to make sure that that original idea gets executed successfully.”
Digitalisation, decarbonisation and people
Ask him where shipping needs to be braver and he pushes back on the premise. The industry is innovative, he argues, given everything it absorbs. It is also cost sensitive, and it has been burned. “In some cases things that were promised did not turn out and there has been a lot of wasted resources.”
What he wants is more appetite for innovation that has been proven, with hard analysis behind the choice, so owners avoid rework, the wrong vendor and technical debt. He also wants simpler ways of working and standardisation of data, so ports, owners and customers can connect to each other. “Get off the emails and sharing spreadsheets and sending PDFs around.”
The third item on his list gets the least airtime. Multi-fuel fleets need crews trained across LNG, methanol and potentially ammonia, and finding enough of them will be hard. Shore teams need retraining as fast as the technology changes, in an industry already handling the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and Section 301.
“In the next five years we have to work in three areas, and that is around digital transformaiton, decarbonisation and people,” he says. “These are the things that are going to have to continue to evolve.”
Peter Jackson is a keynote speaker at the Digital Ship Summit 2026, on 15 October at Ble Pavillon, Athens.
