Ocean Network Express (ONE) plans to go all-in on AI with Google Cloud to advance its vision of delivering intelligent shipping innovations that support economic development.
To do so, the Singapore-headquartered shipping company will establish an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) by leveraging Google Cloud’s data analytics, machine learning (ML) and AI technologies and advisory expertise from Deloitte Consulting Southeast Asia.
The AI CoE aims to imbue an agile culture across ONE’s business; pilot and scale AI initiatives that boost competitive differentiation; and become a destination for top technology talent. By doing so, ONE will be able to enhance its core operations, strengthen customer engagement, and improve its employee experience.
“We recognise that our shipping services underpin smooth economic activity and believe that we must constantly raise industry standards. ONE has therefore decided to deepen our collaboration with Google Cloud and continue working with Deloitte after their stellar support during our initial phase of digital transformation,” says Kosuke Wada, ONE’s executive vice president.
He adds: “By tapping both companies’ core competencies around AI, we can drive transformative change across our entire business, become an innovative leader in the sector, and facilitate economic benefit for people and countries worldwide.”
Cloud-based intelligent maritime innovations
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Prior to this announcement, ONE migrated its mission-critical SAP enterprise resource planning and finance systems onto Google Cloud’s secure, scalable, and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
It is now layering on ML models that intelligently organise the company’s engagement history with its customers to streamline back-office processes and enable ONE staff to respond more quickly to customers.
To help enhance the employee experience, ONE provides a Virtual Assistant chatbot to its employees.
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Integrated with Google Workspace and accessible via Google Chat, the chatbot automates employees’ queries regarding policies and processes to ease the workload of various internal business functions – all while Google Cloud’s secure-by-design infrastructure and end-to-end encryption maintain data governance and security controls.
Using Google Cloud’s advanced natural language understanding technology and pre-built virtual agents, ONE brought this chatbot to life within weeks and avoided having to dedicate significantly more time and resources to build underlying ML frameworks from scratch.
ONE is also combining Google Cloud’s serverless computing, intelligent data lake, and Vertex AI technologies, as well as deploying AI platform pipelines based on MLOps best practices to improve operational efficiency.
The move has enabled it to successfully infuse predictive capabilities – which can be managed by lean and agile teams – into its logistics planning processes to ensure operating precision.
“With at least 11 billion tons of goods transported by sea each year, ONE’s AI transformation not only future-proofs its operations and positions the company as an employer of choice, but also sets the benchmark for the creation of even more smart, efficient, and scalable digital solutions that are needed to meet the ever-growing demands of businesses and economies around the world,” says Ruma Balasubramanian, managing director for Southeast Asia at Google Cloud.
