Navigating artificial intelligence

NAVTOR chief sustainability officer Bjørn Åge Hjøllo has worked in the marine industry for 30 years, using his master’s degree in meteorology in his role as a marine weather forecaster at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

After 12 years he was the head of forecasting and it was in that position he first became aware of a company called C-MAP, which he joined in 2004 and he has worked with the CEO, Tor A. Svanes, ever since.

“We founded NAVTOR in 2011, and that was mainly to meet IMO SOLAS carriage requirement,” said Mr Hjøllo, “with ECDIS starting becoming effective in 2012.” NAVTOR realised it would be challenging for the shipping industry to change over to electronic charts, not so much the charts themselves, but the development of an infrastructure to distribute, update and licence electronic charts.”

A key feature was the shore and ship always had updated Electronic Navigation Charts (ENCs) in compliance. “NAVTOR grew quickly due to the offshore and tanker fleets based in Norway,” said Mr Hjøllo and this growth expanded globally.

In fact, at the time, Mr Hjøllo main focus was the development of the NAVTOR electronic NAVSTATION, and later the Passage-Plan service. This was swiftly followed with updating the ship-to-shore communications package (NavBox) and in recent time the NAVTOR Performance and electronic logbooks services

NAVTOR is also working on next generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) which has recently gathered a lot of attention worldwide through the release of ChatGPT. AI is already present in the many marine applications and software but is now moving to a different level of functionality.

Mr Hjøllo noted that NAVTOR research into next generation AI is to answer the question: How can life in shipping be made easier?