Listen to this Episode with Per Ostman of Veson Nautical Here:
How is artificial intelligence changing the world of maritime shipping and the broader chemical industry supply chain? Victoria Meyer speaks with Per Ostman, VP of Product Management at Veson Nautical, to explore the impact of technology and data-driven solutions on shipping operations. Per shares how Veson Nautical integrates advanced software and AI-enabled workflows to help shipping companies manage complex data, enhance efficiency, and adapt to rapid changes in the marketplace.
Victoria and Per dig into the speed and complexity of shipping data, the importance of system integration, and the role of AI in streamlining tasks like claims handling. The conversation also addresses the human side of technology adoption—how AI is transforming jobs, creating new opportunities, and driving a need for continual learning. With practical advice for industry professionals and real-world examples, this episode offers valuable insight into the intersection of technology, people, and progress in maritime shipping and chemicals.
Victoria and Per explore the following topics:
- Using AI and technology to accelerate maritime operations
- How Veson transforms complex data into actionable supply chain intelligence.
- Using AI to speed up demurrage claims assessment by 300%
- Why AI augments rather than replaces human expertise in shipping.
- Leadership advice for non-traditional career paths
Killer Quote: “Don’t sand down the edges of who you are because then you’re not being your optimal self and you can direct your optimal self to do just about anything.” – Per Ostman
Watch Victoria and Per’s Conversation Here:
Lessons in Change: Adapting Technology, Data, and People in the Modern Shipping Industry
Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where leaders talk business. Today I have the opportunity to speak with Per Ostman, who is the VP of Product Management at Veson Nautical. Veson is a global leader in developing and implementing solutions for maritime shipping. So they are a company that works in and adjacent to not just to the chemical industry, but other industries as well.
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Per and I are going to be talking a lot about the role of technology and AI and how it’s really influencing shipping and shippers and hopefully making it all better for us. So, Per, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here.
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s start with your origin story. How did you get interested in this space?
I’ve been with Veson for almost 18 years now and entered this technology space or the shipping space almost by accident in an organization and in kind of an industry that is, I would say, populated and draws in technologists. So either you majored in computer science in college or you come from a technical or an analytical background in some capacity. Or especially in our industry, you come from a maritime background, maybe. So we have had a lot of success in getting great people from the US Maritime academies.
They actually have sailing experience and understand fundamentally what our software tools need to do. I have neither of those backgrounds. I’m a classics major. So I come at this with maybe a little bit of a different perspective and sometimes maybe a more human perspective in some cases, and in some cases it is leaning on more technical folks to kind of drive certain things. But finding the balance between what software can do, what software should do, and how those sometimes opposing forces result in value capture for us as humans. The people that are doing the work is kind of where I like to sit. So it’s been an interesting balance.
I bet, and I think it’s a great example too. We sometimes think that all the people in the chemical industry and working with chemicals are chemists and chemical engineers. I’m sure you see this in shipping that you must have worked in a maritime capacity. But the reality is just good strategic thinkers, we need people of all kinds of backgrounds and diversity.
Right, come into Veson or come into the industry with a technical background, we’ll teach you shipping. Or come in with a shipping background, we’ll teach you technology. So it’s really not what your background is. It’s, do you have the capacity to learn something new, to adjust, to adapt?
To take that in, because the chemical industry, the shipping industry, any industry, continues to change. And so can you adapt to that change? Can you learn something new? We’re going to talk about AI That’s a big something new for everyone, and so can you do that? Ability to adapt is really critical.
Yeah, so I think it’s interesting, just kind of this diversity, the fact that where you start is not necessarily where you end up. I have four daughters, two of whom are in college, one who’s a recent college grad, one that’s still in high school. We were talking about, like, as an engineer, did you do engineering? And I’m like, I can’t tell you that I ever used the multivariate calculus and differential equations and some of the very obscure formulas and all the math. I just remember pages and pages and pages of calculations. Did I use them directly? No.
Did it help that I understood what they were trying to accomplish and how to think? Yeah, because at the end of the day, you’re learning on the job from other people approaching it in the ways that you need to and that your company needs you to. So let’s talk a little bit about Veson, because not everybody’s maybe familiar with you. Who is Veson Nautical? What do you guys do?
Veson Nautical has been around since 2003, and really the company has its roots even further back from that. Our founder, John Veson, his father actually started the company making software back in back in the good old days. The 70s, the 80s, and making bespoke software tools for the industry. This was distance tables, this was voyage estimation, fit for purpose tools for specific aspects of shipping. When John took the reins over and kind of reconsolidated the company in the early 2000s, the value at the time, and I think is still the case today, is taking maybe some of these disparate solutions or systems and actually having a platform where these tools are part of the same toolbox.
They all are natively integrated together. So what you have is this end to end foundation where you can run your business. That business specifically is the orchestration of the contracts, marine bulk freight. That’s kind of been our bread and butter for the last 20 years.
Okay, that makes sense. There’s obviously so much data across the shipping industry. Every industry has a lot of data. But when I think about marine movements and shipping, you talk about shipping tables and stuff and it’s like I have a vague knowledge that those things exist. But I know that there’s gotta be reams and reams of data and data points that somehow you have to make sense of in order to be effective and to improve and to really run businesses.
Absolutely, and I think that’s always a constant challenge for us and the industry at large.
Where data is extremely powerful, but there’s also so much of it. How do you surface the right data at the right time? Shipping is in some ways a very, very simple business, but the realities get very complicated and nuanced very quickly. I think especially in the chemical trade where you’re talking about parcel tankers and it’s not simply an oil tanker where you give me all the oil you have and I will take it across the ocean. It is multiple different charters with parcels on a given vessel. Multiple different birth calls at a port. It’s two weeks in Houston rotating around and that schedule, that birth rotation, changes every five minutes for multiple different factors. So all of the planning, all of the data that goes into that planning, there’s insight in there and it’s hard to extract, but you have to have a platform and a system that can help with that data in context, servicing insight and presenting the user in those roles. Charters owners and operators with the right information at the right time.
I think it’s a great topic. I’m going to bring it back around, but let’s start with this a little bit. I’ve talked to a number of people and really called the 2000s the decade of supply chain. I think the average consumer had no idea what supply chain was until Covid hit and they realized, well, that’s why they weren’t getting a widget at Walmart, was because of supply chain. Of course, there are those that are in it, living it, chemical companies, shipping companies, supporters like you. We’re in it.
We are in this decade of supply chain. What are you seeing though? What are you seeing as the biggest challenges today, where we sit in 2025 and going into 2026 and beyond, what are the biggest challenges that shippers and shipping companies are facing?
Yeah, I think it’s adjacent to the data piece. I think it’s the speed of data. I have all this data now. What do I do with it?
You have situations where schedules change or there’s a lineup at the port or there’s a container ship going up the Suez Canal and hitting the wind in the wrong way, and all of a sudden you have the need to adapt quickly. Those adaptations that are driven by folks in offices coordinating these movements, how is that data getting sent through up and down that logistical chain, in the right way? Are you able to update data like the ETA of a vessel at a particular location? Is that information getting to the first link in that chain, but then is it also getting to the rest of those links upstream and downstream? And, we found out how brittle those links are and can be.
So I think what people are looking for is finding the right way to strengthen those connections but maintaining the flexibility for the adaptation inherent in the industry. And it’s a big challenge.
It is a really big challenge. I mean, I think as you talk about, it’s both data and relationships. Part of the way companies and businesses make money is by having the relationships and knowing a little bit more about, oh, well, maybe I can’t go from point A to point B, but I know exactly how to go from A to B to D to C, back to D and make it work. One of the things that strikes me as well is when you talk about like these different pillars of data, let’s call it that, it also seems like they would be in different systems. That’s a challenge, right? How do you get data out of one system into another system to combine that? Is that something that you guys do? I mean, is that part of what Veson does or are you working in alignment with other systems?
Kind of both, is how I would answer that question. I mean, there’s a couple of different pieces to that. There’s no single software system or software platform that does absolutely everything in the world.
Yeah. Even though some of them would like to say we are the everything. That’s not the case.
Yeah, exactly. Where we try to sit is we feel that we are best of breed in kind of the marine space, in that logistical thing. But on either side of kind of our platform, there will be an ETRM or a CTRM, a trading and risk system for the commodity, valuing that trade and optimizing those transportation modalities. We’re the marine transportation modality, downstream from us would be an SAP, a corporate accounting system.
Everyone has those and we don’t try to be necessarily either of those things. So the ability to integrate systems together is something that has been around forever. It’s one of the reasons why we at Veson have been as successful as we’ve been, is our ability and willingness to integrate with any system. So coming back to that foundational decision 20 years ago to say, hey, it’s not just I have a tool for traders, I have a tool for operators, I have a tool to do accruals and for broker, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s having a common platform that has a common language for the data right across all of those roles. That common language not only helps you work together internally at an organization at a data level, but also externally.
So when you’re trying to knit these systems together, it becomes very easy and straightforward. So we’ve always done that. But where that is now going to change, because the challenge becomes very, very real. I need to get this information not just to the places that I’ve always known I had to get it to, I got to get it to all these other places.
The best way and faster and accurately and easy.
Yeah, things are not slowing down. They’re speeding up. How do we do that in the right way? I think this is where AI starts to come into play.
We want to use AI for lots of different things. One thing that it’s very good at is translation. That’s not just language translation, that’s technical and data translation. So the mapping exercise between System A and System B, the AI can do that. When we think about what is here now and coming not in months and years, but in weeks and months, is that ability to say, okay, we want to integrate these two systems together, the AI is going to participate in that connection and make that faster.
That’s fascinating because when I was at Shell, what now feels like a long time ago, I actually left Shell 10 years ago today, I think.
Congratulations.
Thank you, it was a great experience and a great ride while I was there. But one of the things I did early in my career was around implementing e-business systems. But I also managed a process excellence and process enablement group where, you talk about data mapping, there was data mapping teams of people for everything. Because it’s complicated.
It’s really complicated.
You see AI as being able to simplify and streamline that.
Absolutely. I mean that’s recognizing patterns, doing translation, classifying data taking maybe it’s unstructured data, making it structured and then manipulating that structure. That’s what AI is really, really good at right now.
AI will continue to evolve, but that’s what it is right now. There are aspects of every industry, I mean, technology certainly, but things like law, if you think about the law industry very rapidly the days of locking 20 junior associates in a room and highlighting depositions, that’s gone. All those billable hours are gone because the AI will do that in 10 minutes. So this pace of technology and harnessing it in the right way and focusing it. That’s the challenge for people in our industry and on the technology side and kind of across other industries.
Yeah. That brings up two great questions. I’m going to start though with a Veson specific question which is around you guys are doing some work now rolling out an AI enabled tool. Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, absolutely. In the spring we launched our first AI enabled workflow within our platform, our claims workflow. We’ve named our AI Co-Captain. And so what Co-Captain will do is automate the material aspects of the demurrage and claims process. Primarily all of this information that I’m getting from multiple different sources about a claim.
Either I’ve got to collect it to go make a claim or I’m receiving all of this information and someone is making a claim for me, pulling all that information together and calculating the claim result. So all of those different documents in different formats from different places coming in, all of that data, right? The contracts that underpin and govern the guardrails around what can be claimed, what clauses are there, all the deductions, etc. But pulling all that information in which today is entirely manual and it’s akin to the law doc review example. It’s people printing out PDFs and looking for stuff, that is a great use case for what AI is good at today. That pattern recognition, pulling that information in, classifying and structuring it, and then presenting it in a system so that a human can say, oh, that’s the right clause or hey, this data point is incorrect coming in from this agent or whatever it is. Now I can move this forward, or here is the calculation that’s going to drive my P&L and affect it in a certain way. I need to know that I need to raise a flag or hey, this claim isn’t worth my time. I’m going to move on.
So what’s the response been to this?
The response has been extremely positive and we’re very excited about it. We’ve had a number of our client base start to adopt the workflow in Co-Captain, which has been really exciting. One of the things that has always made us successful is working hand in glove with key clients. We’ve had a few in this case as well. So they’ve helped to drive and guide us as we’ve built this out because I think where things get a little dangerous is where you try to build into something that isn’t driving value for someone.
So doing it for the sake of doing it is great. You want to have innovation in that way, but you want to focus it towards the value capture. We were lucky enough to have a great client community that helps us do that.
That’s awesome. So this leads to the question I really have which is around people. So when you talked a little bit about Co-Captain, you referenced the human intervention part. But to me the scary thing as people express what they’re worried about with AI and look at your news and headlines are around how AI is taking jobs and stuff. So there’s this whole aspect of getting people to accept the use of it and understanding how it fits into roles, jobs, thinking what they do. What do you see with that? Because I think that’s a big tension around the effectiveness of this.
Yeah, this is the same tensions that have existed for the last couple hundred years around new technologies, like during the Industrial Revolution. This is the same tension and it’s here today. I think we all feel it. Our posture on this is to be kind of deliberate. AI is a tool like any other tool and you can use it for the right reasons or you can use it for the wrong reasons. If you’re taking a perspective of, oh well, AI can do everything. Well, it can, but a hammer can open a window, but only once. So you got to use the right tool for the right job. What we’ve tried to do with Co-Captain and the claims workflow, this is a great example of that, let’s use this new tool right. To do something that really, really drives value for the users.
Does that claims analyst want to spend a day and a half looking through charter party documents and chasing an agent to get an updated statement of facts just to do a calculation that will then kind of affect the outcome? Or should that be automated so that this analyst can leverage relationships with that agent, relationships with a counterparty on the claim to actually have the negotiation in the right way?
I think people are like, oh, will AI replace my job? I think what we try to do is, how can we improve and enhance the lives of the users that we have in our platform? We don’t want to replace, but there are things that we can automate, right? There is data that we can surface and illuminate to help people make better decisions and to help those same users do their job in a better way.
Yeah, and I agree with you and it’s back to its enabling, right? And so it enables you to go do something else. Like, to your point, do we really want to spend a day and a half just digging through documents and highlighting the three lines for this claim or understand the search and put it in and have it come out so I can evaluate it. You still need a human to intervene, to make decisions, to direct. So I think it’s not taking away jobs, it’s changing what you’re doing.
Right. It’s not replacing, it’s enhancing. And I’ll give you kind of an example of this. It’s not directly related to AI, but it is technology. About a year and a half ago, Veson Nautical and a couple of other technology companies were invited to participate in a summit with some leading chemical carriers and chemical producers. The purpose of this summit was, we all have the same problems, how can we use technology to solve some of these problems? Around birth rotation and scheduling and all these things. We sat in a room together and we had some really, really good conversations for two days. And the major outcome of all of those discussions and again, this was, how can we use technology to solve these problems? The outcome of that summit was an agreement for these carriers and these chemical producers to pick up the phone and talk to each other more.
So technology doesn’t have to do everything, and it probably shouldn’t. Our challenge as a technology provider and a technology partner is focusing that technology where it should be.
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Yeah, I think it’s a great example. In fact, it’s funny because I think the next generation, as it comes up, I see this with my kids, I see this with young adults, they don’t want to pick up the phone. Oh, do I really have to talk to that person? Can’t I just go on the app or send a message or whatever? Yes, you do. Now, by the way, I’m a lot older than them and I still at times am like, do I really have to talk to this person? Can’t you make it easier? So there are some situations where, yes, I want to actually talk to the individual and then there’s others where I’m like, just give me the app. It’s going to take me two minutes to do it and move on.
In the lower left quadrant of technology and AI, what it can do is it can wall you off. You can create the constructs around you so that you actually don’t have to interact on a human level with somebody. You can hide behind the screen and, when we think about like, what can AI do? Oh, AI can write the email for me. I can have an AI composer and write my email. Well, is that really the right application of this incredibly powerful technology? You can write an email. You know how to do that.
And what’s actually more important about that? Not that you can or can’t write an email or send a text or whatever, but is it you sending that email? Is it you communicating? Is that your style and your personality and your essential humanity coming through that communication? That relationship that you have with the other person who’s receiving that is important. Until we all decide that it’s not. And that’s a science fiction novel.
Yeah, I will admit I use ChatGPT way more than I ever used to, and I do use it to help with communications, but not completely. But it’s like, okay, this is the situation. This is what I want to summarize. Give me some ways of framing it, and I will go back and say, that does not sound like me. Oh, you’re right, because it always tells me I’m right. Which there’s something nice about that, by the way, because I get told I’m wrong a lot too. You can’t just rely on the technology. You have to still personalize it, understand its impact, what you’re trying to achieve because it does not know nuance.
Whether it’s data nuance or verbal nuance or anything. It doesn’t know nuance.
It doesn’t. There is art and science, and business is the marriage of those two things. If you could just do it by reading a book, then everyone would do that and everyone would read the summary of that book on ChatGPT. If it was that simple, everyone would be a billionaire. That’s just not how it works. There is an art to literally everything that we do, and AI is not going to replace that.
Yeah, awesome. So final question. Let’s talk about leadership. I like to ask my guests this because I think the answers are great and there’s a lot of people that listen to The Chemical Show, and they’re like, oh, yeah, I really like knowing about the person, how you got there and how you’ve evolved. My question is this, as someone with a non-traditional background in chemicals and shipping, what advice would you give to someone looking to break into the industry or yourself when you were just starting in this space 18 years ago? What do you wish somebody had told you at that point in time?
I guess there are two things that I would say. One, don’t be afraid of the things that make you unique when you come into any industry. The things that make you unique are also the things that make you effective. Don’t sand down the edges of who you are, because then you’re not being your optimal self and you can direct your optimal self to do just about anything. So you’re not going to be effective if you try to be like everybody else. Being unique, being different is important. We want a diversity of perspectives. That’s what helps drive industries forward. That’s what makes companies successful. If everyone agreed all the time and had the same perspective, that would not be a landscape that we want.
And I think the other thing that I would say is pick the things you care about and care about them deeply. You can’t care about everything all of the time, but find the things that make you passionate and care about those things. Within the business, within your career, within the industry that you’re working in there should be things that you care about very, very deeply. And then there’s some other things that you can let go and let’s not be emotional about those things.
But pick the things you care about.
Love it. Great advice. Per, thank you so much for joining me today. I’ve really appreciated and enjoyed our conversation.
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
Absolutely. And thanks, everyone for listening. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.
About Per Ostman:
Per Ostman
Per Ostman is responsible for the product management and strategic direction of Veson’s flagship solution, the Veson IMOS Platform. Per’s tenure with the company has spanned multiple departments at Veson, including Professional Services, Product, Account Management, and Marketing.