Tribal Dungeons of Global Shipping: AI Agents at Global Scale — Dmitry Buykin, Maersk
Aug 29, 2026 · 12:02
Dmitry Buykin of Maersk explains that global shipping's hardest AI problem is not the agent loop but the refining loop around it, turning tribal dungeons of screenshot-based SOPs into executable procedures. He reports 200 production instances at scales up to 10-minute latencies, with a procedure corpus 20 times larger than runtime because the same step differs across countries. Accuracy was earned through over 100,000 corrections in nine months, heat maps turning traces into priorities, and corrections counting only when they become executable changes. He advocates five moves — make work representable, execution bounded, behavior observable, correction cheap, improvement compound — and skipping MCP for tuned composite tools, since 'please be careful' is not a guardrail.
