Tribal Dungeons of Global Shipping: AI Agents at Global Scale — Dmitry Buykin, Maersk
Maersk engineer warns legacy SOPs are unexecutable by agents, requiring full SOP translation layer
“Experts own the what, agents own the how. And exception becomes a guardrail.”
Dmitry Buykin from Maersk shares a practitioner report on deploying AI agents in global shipping operations, where the core challenge is translating legacy human-oriented SOPs (screenshots and click instructions) into agent-executable procedures with preconditions, decisions, validation, and recovery steps. He introduces the concept of 'tribal dungeons' — operational knowledge that exists but is not in a form an agent can safely execute. His key architectural insight is that the refining feedback loop around the agent is the real system, not the agent loop itself.