While You Watch the Shopping Bots, the Ships Start Buying
Or What An Autonomous Port Reveals About Who You Actually Sell To
The World AI Device Expo in Shenzhen is not a quiet place.
Coloured lights, multi-layered sound, the cacophony of noise made by a few hundred companies, all certain the future runs on whatever they’re demoing. The show’s theme this year was “From the Cloud to the Terminal”. AI is leaving the data centre and arriving as physical things you can stand next to, pick up or even drive around in.
I’d been walking the floor for a while when I reached the Shenzhen Port Group stand, where two young women were telling me, with real excitement, about the Group’s ambition to run 50% of the port operations using AI. They were trade-show people, so some of that is the job, but the pride was genuine. Behind them were humanoid robots, robots that move on tracks, drones…oh my. Photographs of autonomous cranes lifting boxes off ships with nobody at the controls.
Standing there, I was looking at a port being automated but slowly realised I was actually looking at an economy of machines. The banner didn't say port. It said "marine-economy service provider." At the time I thought it was the usual stand puffery. Turns out, it wasn't.
But before we go there, let’s inspect where most peoples heads are at. The majority of conversation about machine customers is stuck on one image. A consumer’s AI agent, dispatched to buy a tube of moisturiser, comparing prices, clicking purchase. That’s the picture everyone reaches for… the helpful little shopper agent acting on your behalf. It’s also the most trivial version of the thing. I’ve written about five faces of the machine customer, and the delegated agent buying your shampoo is only the first. It’s the one everybody can already see. The port shows you the rest at once, running together, at industrial scale.
Walk around that port in Shenzhen with the question…who here is a customer? … and it gets crowded fast. The ship approaching the berth needs fuel, a slot, settlement. The autonomous crane needs maintenance, parts, power. The fleet of driverless trucks needs routing, charging, repair. The drones need airspace and instructions. Each one is a counterparty with things to buy, schedule and pay for. Not one of them is a person.
Sounds like a forecast but it’s not. The Yara Birkeland… the world’s first fully electric, autonomous container ship… has been running a fixed feeder route in Norway for three years, more than 250 voyages and around 35,000 container moves, replacing some 40,000 truck trips a year. It still carries a small safety crew because…‘regulation’. Not because the technology can’t manage without them, but because the rules haven’t decided it’s allowed to. While the capability is proven, the permission for it to run alone isn’t. But hold that thought for a moment while we swing back to China.
At Mawan in western Shenzhen… a different operator, China Merchants Port… China’s first fully automated terminal already runs around 38 driverless trucks under remote-controlled cranes. The direction of travel is national: “AI+港航”, AI for ports and shipping, is an explicit state programme, with Tianjin Port putting a port-specific large model into service back in 2024. Maersk, meanwhile, already uses AI negotiation bots to settle trucking contracts while ships are still at sea, so the terms are agreed before the vessel arrives. Machines, negotiating with machines, while still on approach. A whole ocean surface and coastline, transacting.
If you’re looking for the tell, it’s actually in the language. Shenzhen Port Group doesn’t call itself a port. The banner over the stand described a “marine-economy integrated service provider of outstanding global influence.” Giving that a deeper look, it’s not positioning itself as a port operator. It’s showing up as a service provider for the entire marine economy. They intend to be the biggest machine customer in their ecosystem and the thing that serves every other machine in it. A while ago I wrote about a fictional procurement agent I called Node 741, running fulfilment for a network of drones with real spending authority. Shenzhen Port Group is Node 741 with a coastline attached. It’s made of steel, and state-owned. You can read that article below.
So why does any of this change the commercial picture, and not just the operational one? Because of what machines are, as customers.
A platform only gets to charge rent when it controls access and the counterparty can’t route around it. Humans route around things constantly…out of loyalty, spite, habit, a better offer heard at a dinner party. Machines don’t. A machine customer transacts on the terms encoded in the protocol. It doesn’t sulk, doesn’t defect, doesn’t develop a soft spot for your competitor. It goes where the API points it.
Machines are the first customers you can fully capture. Whoever controls the protocol they transact through controls everyone else’s access to their own customers.
A port that runs as a closed loop of machines, then, doesn’t only move shipping containers more cheaply. It becomes the toll-keeper of its own ecosystem… precisely because its customers have no leverage to refuse the terms. For everyone who sells through that port, the disintermediation is more subtle than they expect. Think about who currently sells to a ship. The fuel bunkering company, the parts supplier, the maintenance contractor, the tug operator. Today each of them deals with the vessel directly. Once the port runs the ecosystem and owns the protocol every machine transacts through, the marine-fuel supplier doesn't lose the ship's business to a cheaper rival. It loses direct access to the ship at all…every transaction now routed through the port's system, on the port's terms. The supplier still exists. It just no longer reaches its own customer without permission.
The shipping container did this once already, to the physical layer. A standard steel box, and suddenly it didn’t matter whose factory or whose ship…the box fit everything. Open season is being called on the standard for the transaction layer between machines. A state-owned port has put its hand up first.
None of this is speculation about where the money goes once the boxes move themselves. The past can give us the direction of travel for the future. Airports worked it out decades ago. Landing the plane, the regulated and commoditised core, is not where the profit lives. Non-aeronautical revenue… the shops, the parking, the property… runs at around 37 to 40% of global airport income and is the part that actually keeps airports solvent. The scarce thing, the slot, becomes the asset: a single pair of Heathrow landing slots has changed hands for roughly 75 million US dollars. Priced access to constrained infrastructure. That’s the business.
Shipping is walking the same path and not hiding the fact. Maersk spent the last decade repositioning from an ocean carrier into an “integrator of container logistics” to escape the brutal economics of commodity freight… its Logistics & Services arm brought in $15.1 billion of a $54 billion total in 2025. DP World has rebranded itself from “port operator” to “trade enabler”, turning the data its automation generates into products it can sell. Box-moving commoditises to the floor and becomes the loss-leader. The margin migrates to access, slots, settlement, identity, data.
Which brings me back to the stand at the AI Device Show in Shenzhen, and the question I keep circling. Is anyone ready to serve an entire port, and every one of its component parts (agents, robots and drones…), as a customer?
The current executive responses, asked about the machine-customer threat, picture an agent skipping their brand at checkout. The moisturiser. The travel booking. The running shoe. They’re watching the one face that barely matters while the other four reorganise the coastline they sell across. The two women at the stand thought they were selling a port when really, they were showing us who the customer is about to be.
Whether anyone’s ready to serve that customer on their own terms… or someone else’s… is the massive opportunity about to unfold.
Katja Forbes is the author of Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun and helps organisations prepare for a world where their next customer won’t be human. She advises businesses and speaks globally on Machine Customer Experience and why customer-focused leaders are uniquely positioned to shape this transformation.