We stand on the foothills of a transformational era in human history. Success in a highly dynamic business environment requires the ability to make informed decisions faster than the competition. Businesses can no longer afford to dwell on vast amounts of data to “train” human intuition. In the transportation industry, tomorrow’s successful companies will not be those that do only one thing well, but those that can optimize and harvest value out of a multitude of activities. Seaport monitoring & management is a significant research area, in which infrastructure automatically collects big data that lead the organization in its multiple activities. Thus, building up a smart port is heavily related to the fields of data acquisition, transfer, storage, big data analysis and information visualization. These data are rendered useless without a system that enables a meaningful visualization and helps make decisions.

The more algorithms that improve, accelerate decision making and support human experts, the more time and resources those experts and their enterprises will have for innovation. We already see increasing volumes of data being captured and processed to facilitate a better understanding of everyday life. The information to be found in data is critical to the transportation industry as well. The transition to cognitive logistics is a multi-year journey that will require effective leadership, sound understanding of business value drivers, Artificial Intelligence skills and talent, and an organizational culture that supports the ongoing development of AI-driven business.

In this paper, we present empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that a Smart Sea Port of the future will be governed by Intelligence Amplification (IA), or human intelligence complemented by AI, totally disrupting the way we work today.