Splash invited senior technology leaders across the industry, including Garry Noonan, Ardmore’s Director, Innovation, to contribute to its Digital Market Report. Splash published a selection of his commentary alongside the full report. Here, we recap Garry’s contribution, as well as his views on other aspects of shipping’s digitalisation, all of which are linked by one clear thread: technology only earns its place in shipping when it strengthens the judgement of the people using it.
Splash’s Digital Market Report 2026 draws on a survey of senior technology leaders across the industry, including Garry Noonan. Splash published three of his answers in companion pieces alongside the report, each linked below.
Asked what actually stops digital tools scaling across fleets or ports, Garry looked beyond the usual list of cost, integration and skills. “The honest answer is none of them,” he told Splash. “It’s people.” A tool can be fully specified and proven in a pilot, and still fail if the people expected to use it weren’t part of the process. At Ardmore, that means explaining to crew exactly why a new tool is being introduced, rather than just announcing it, and designating a champion on each vessel, so the teams onboard are participants rather than recipients. Get that wrong, he said, and “people will quietly work around even the best technology.”
That same principle carries into a Splash article titled The interoperability imperative. Garry’s frustration here is practical. Bringing in a new tool too often means a costly, bespoke project just to make it talk to what’s already installed, because everyone’s data sits in its own format behind its own interface. His answer is a single open standard for vessel and equipment data, one that would move integration “close to plug-and-play rather than a six-month exercise.” That change, Garry argues, matters more than any single new application, because it lowers the cost of testing new ideas. The easier it becomes to evaluate new technology, the faster the industry can work out what actually delivers value.
A second article, How to stay in command in the age of AI, turned to the people who will be working alongside these systems. Garry believes that the future seafarer needs to retain the ability to operate when the system isn’t operational. The risk here, he explains, is that human capability can atrophy when the system works perfectly, leaving the vessel vulnerable when it fails; whether that’s GNSS jamming or spoofing, ECDIS freezing, or an optimisation tool producing a recommendation that simply looks wrong. His solution is to make sure maritime academies don’t let navigation, engineering knowledge and situational awareness get crowded out by new tools. Those fundamentals become more valuable, not less, once crews are supervising automation, rather than operating it directly.
The same argument closes the loop in AI and shipping over the next five years, which explored where industry leaders see AI taking the industry. The survey found the same qualification from almost everyone who responded; that intelligence is only as useful as the data, context and connectivity underneath it. Garry’s contribution was more direct: “technology delivers its greatest value when it enhances human decision-making, not replaces it.” That same logic extends to his response to Splash’s question on where he’d spend a blank cheque for maritime technology. Garry would invest in the people operating the vessel, providing decision-support designed around the master, not the algorithm, training and simulators that build real judgement, and interfaces that make technology easier to question. Spend on the vessel, his argument runs, and you optimise a single voyage. Spend on the crew, and every system already onboard will work better, and the judgement that keeps a ship safe remains intact.
At the centre of Garry’s perspective are the people onboard, not the technology itself. He calls for open standards that simplify integration and training that strengthens and empowers the crew at the same time as automation takes on more of the routine tasks. A champion on every vessel helps ensure new technology arrives with an explanation, rather than an announcement. That’s what performance and progress on technology look like from the bridge.
