Meet Shippy: Agent Built for Ocean Intelligence
Skylight introduces the first free and transparent AI agent for real-time maritime domain awareness. Now inviting early adopters to shape its future.
“Give me a brief of all fishing activity in Fiji’s Exclusive Economic Zone in the last 24 hours."
It’s a simple-sounding question—the kind monitoring centers ask every day as part of their daily brief. Answering it, though, is rarely simple: an analyst has to check across multiple systems, cross-reference what each one picked up, factor in conditions like weather, and assemble the picture by hand. That can take hours.
Shippy is built to close that gap. An analyst can ask it in their own words and get back a structured, cited answer in minutes.
Skylight's ethos has always been to cut through the clutter and reveal what wasn't visible before. From the very beginning, the platform’s models changed what could be surfaced across the ocean. Shippy changes how quickly analysts can find the data they need, fuse it with other information, and utilize it to make real-life decisions.
Why we built Shippy
The work of protecting our ocean deserves AI built specifically for this critical task, especially in under-resourced states where coast guards and fisheries agencies monitor vast waters, and their watch floors often lack sufficient staffing. Additionally, general-purpose AI tools lack the domain expertise and real-time data sources to provide maritime intelligence.
That is why Shippy is built directly to work with Skylight’s live data, including vessel tracks and satellite detections. Analysts can follow each result back to the same Skylight record they would have pulled up themselves, verify it, and reproduce it inside the platform. Data accuracy and reproducibility are core to our community, which makes enforcement and compliance decisions based on these data.
Shippy also marries Skylight data with trusted partners' data to answer richer questions, such as Global Fishing Watch and Trygg Mat Tracking’s vessel data, SkyTruth’s oil pollution data, and marine regulations from ProtectedSeas’ Navigator. We know Shippy can serve the community better if it isn’t limited to Skylight data alone. We envision collaboration – with clear attribution – being critical to building a tool this community can trust.
What it looks like in practice
Speeding up the creation of daily briefs is just one of many possible applications. Shippy can also provide data for risk assessments and operational planning: dark detections, notable patterns, vessel types in transit, and satellite coverage gaps.
"Any fishing hotspots in this area worth considering for my patrol path?"
While providing responses, Shippy also shows its homework:
“Show me all the dark vessel detections in the Galápagos EEZ over the last 7 days.”
Or
“Where are all Belize-flagged fish carriers active globally right now?”
Links to the Skylight map and vessel detail pages show the results in context. AI organizes the data and makes it traceable – human beings validate the work, extend the analysis, and apply the judgment.
While surfacing signals, Shippy also provides caveats about data it does not have access to and leaves decisions about where to send a patrol to whom it belongs — the humans in the room. That is by design. Enforcement decisions carry accountability and require jurisdiction, context, and experience that should sit with the people trained to make them. Where a question reaches beyond its scope, Shippy stops rather than guessing.
How We’re Rolling Shippy Out
Like the rest of Skylight, Shippy will be provided at no cost to governments, regional fisheries bodies, and qualifying NGOs. Right now, Shippy is available to a small group of trusted agencies, as well as partners such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Joint Analytical Cell. This group knows Skylight data deeply, which matters during this phase of stress testing and validating results. We will continue to roll out Shippy to the wider Skylight community so we can tune the guardrails, add new skills, and pressure-test the experience as we go.
This is how we envision building AI responsibly while serving the communities that need it most.
If you would like to be one of the first to learn about Shippy when it's available for further testing, sign up here. We are prioritizing partners doing operational maritime work, where Shippy will be tested against the kinds of questions it was built for.
