Four jobs. One crew.
Almost everything sold as marine AI does one of these. A few do two. The boat needs all four, and it needs them to know about each other.
A manual reader that cannot see your engine data will tell you what the book says, not what your engine is doing. A maintenance tracker that cannot see the weather cannot tell you the service is due before a four-day passage. Separate tools cannot answer the questions that sit between them.
Every manual on the boat, and the page that answers you
Engine, genset, watermaker, autopilot, the lot, read and indexed. Ask a question in your own words and the answer comes back citing the page it came from, so you can check it. This is the part of the market that is well served, and it is table stakes.
Included in the AI tier
Live engine and systems data, off your own instruments
Every NMEA system on the boat, watched continuously, with edge compute aboard so it keeps working when the connection does not. This is the one nobody else sells. Search for AI over boat engine data and you get commercial shipping platforms. Search for AI on the marine data bus and you get gateways and converters. Hardware, not software.
Needs the hardware pack, quoted to your boat
Maintenance, stores and who is qualified to sail
Service intervals tracked against real hours, evidence captured as you go, inventory that decrements when you use something, and an audit pack that assembles itself. The Crew knows who is aboard, what they are ticketed for and when each certificate expires.
Included in the AI tier
The weather, the route, and whether to go
Briefings, route advice, GRIB-checked passages and the Ship’s Log written as you sail. Weather routing is usually a separate subscription to a separate company that knows nothing about your boat. Here it knows your draft, your polars and what your engine is doing.
Included in the AI tier
You ask once. The Captain asks the rest.
Behind one prompt, the Captain puts the question to whichever crew member holds the answer, and to more than one when the answer needs them. Should we leave on Thursday is a weather question, an engine-hours question, a stores question and a crew-certificate question at the same time. Four separate apps give you four separate answers and leave the joining up to you, at the chart table, at ten at night.
That is the whole argument for one system. Not that the parts are better on their own, but that they can see each other.
Three things worth saying plainly.
The engine data needs hardware. Three of the four run on the software alone. Watching your NMEA systems means a box on the boat, and we quote that to the vessel rather than pretending it is a download.
The Hearing is still in trials. Acoustic and vibration sensing is aboard Shimbiri and listening. It is not shipped, and we will not sell it until it is.
None of it replaces your judgement. Every answer cites where it came from so you can check it. A system that asks to be trusted without showing its working has not earned the helm.
If you already know which manual to open, a chatbot is fine.
That is worth saying plainly, because it is true. Upload one PDF to any good general model and ask it a question and you will get a good answer. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
The work is everything either side of that. A boat carries several hundred documents: engine, genset, watermaker, autopilot, chartplotter, windlass, fridge, heads, the two different inverters and the one that came with the boat and was never replaced. The question is rarely “what does page 84 say”. It is “which of these three hundred documents is the one that explains this alarm”. That is the part you cannot do by attaching a file.
And a manual on its own cannot tell you whether the reading in front of you is normal. The answer changes when the system knows your engine hours, what your voltage has been doing all week, the sea state you are about to sail into and when that impeller was last replaced. A chatbot with a PDF knows the book. It does not know the boat.
Built for the boat one person still has to run.
Below a certain size the market offers free phone apps. Above it, superyacht management platforms that start in the tens of thousands a year and assume a professional crew to operate them. In between sits the boat that is genuinely complex and still run by the people who own it, and that is the boat this was built for.
Today the system runs on boats from 33 to 82 feet: a Sun Fast racer, a Dufour cruiser, a Fountaine Pajot catamaran, a Hanse 575, a Seawind catamaran, a Maritimo motor yacht and a McConaghy 82. Sail and power, cruising, racing and commercial.