Synopsis
In 2025, Fastloop helped Teekay launch Ask Axel, a generative AI solution designed to make marine shipping smarter and safer. The launch demonstrated Fastloop’s ability to rapidly translate cutting-edge AI agent innovations into production-ready enterprise solutions.
Highlights
Find and understand information from 4000 safety and maintenance documents in under 10 seconds
Enable safer, smarter, and more efficient global shipping operations
Understand regulations across global ports of call with a powerful natural language AI agent
Challenges
For onboard Teekay employees, getting the right information at the right time is tough. Teekay knows that improved accessibility to important documentation and faster understanding of it would lead to safer, smarter, and more efficient operations.
Core challenges include:
Making use of AI-powered data solutions could free up the time employees spend doing the tedious work of tracking down which documents have the right policies, procedures, alerts, references, or anything else required on the job.
Manually reviewing documents to determine what changed across specific timeframes requires a lot of employee effort. With information available as structured and unstructured data across everything from SQL databases to video files, any solution would need to be able to analyze all of it
Ensuring vessels are compliant with SIRE (Ship Inspection Report Programme) and a host of international standards requires internal checklists and time-consuming manual processes
Solution
Fastloop addressed Teekay’s challenges by developing an onboard generative AI agent designed to make shipping smarter and safer by streamlining logistics, enhancing safety protocols, and seamlessly searching across onboard systems and data sources in real time. It’s called Ask Axel.
Starting with a proof-of-concept build before operationalizing it across the organization, Ask Axel was built using the capabilities of the Google Cloud Platform to handle structured and unstructured data, perform real-time data ingestion from source system, and handle a broad range of document types.
Key components of the solution:
- Using a secure log-in, employees open Ask Axel’s custom-built interface and type their desired prompt.
- Vertex AI is utilized to determine the intent of the prompt, with additional services built in by Fastloop purposely boosting specific, highly-relevant answers and documentation. Those services were adapted to the current importance and popularity of a document, namely, how often other employees are accessing these documents. This maximises the likelihood of employees receiving the most important information even if their individual prompts differ.
- Once the intention is determined, it is brought to BigQuery, where all data and documents from Docmap are continually being ingested as they are updated. Unstructured data like regulatory PDFs are run through an AI service that converts them to readable, tabular data.
- Ask Axel has version-tracking capabilities for documents, which allows employees to ask queries like “what has changed in this document since the last version?” With a consistent document reference number, updates are captured and summarized by PDF Diff that shows the differences.
Docmap connection
The Google Cloud Platform solutions that Fastloop has developed are able to ingest documents stored on Docmap — the maritime quality, health, safety and environmental (QHSE) management software used by Teekay and many other marine transportation organizations.
Custom user interface
The solutions come together with a custom built user interface that employees can access from their existing tools.
Results and Impact
The initial proof-of-concept received extremely positive feedback among the Teekay executive leaders. It allows employees to have key points and summarized information at their fingertips, gathering information from 4000 documents in under 10 seconds. As a result, the Fastloop delivery team will continue to support the Ask Axel AI solution being operationalized across the company to save employees time and increase accuracy.
Why Fastloop.ai?
Teekay had experienced mixed results when working with other systems integrators in the past, so it was important that Fastloop quickly built trust around their key competencies.
Proving worth with real action
Fastloop focused this engagement around building a proof-of-concept and building it fast. This showed Teekay that Fastloop could deliver value quickly without an over-investment in time and resources.
Providing a business-centric education in AI
Fastloop is not only a highly competent technical partner, but one that truly understands business needs. They were able to teach Teekay about the many ways AI can generate real business value, and also where AI solutions are more future hopes and hype than measurable business value.
Future Outlook
The success of Ask Axel has led to further, deeper collaboration with Teekay on everything from leading AI-powered improvements on day-to-day operations to a five-year strategy for embedding AI across the business. Some of the specific opportunities identified include:
Machine learning with Vertex AI, BQML & AutoML
By developing models that move from pure summarization towards predictive insights and recommendations, Ask Axel can provide a wide-array of real-time analysis.
Expand into conversational analytics (the convergence of AI and BI)
GenAI interfaces built into analytics allowing users to prompt against semantic models and receive a refreshed view in real-time.
Enabling efficient workflows with AI
There are multiple opportunities here that could include embedding GenAI agents, calling AI services from applications when a user takes an action, completing activities on behalf of a user based on models, and more.