AI Helps Russian Seafarers Get Hired Faster
A new intelligent document-processing system automates job applications in the fishing industry, cutting paperwork time from hours to seconds.
The Russkaya Rybopromyshlennaya Companiya, one of the country’s leading fishing enterprises, has implemented an artificial intelligence system from Smart Engines to automate the hiring of seafarers. The AI instantly transfers information from scanned documents — from passports to seafarer IDs — directly into job application forms within the 1C system. This has made onboarding new personnel several times faster. The technology demonstrates not only Russia’s growing leadership in industrial AI but also its potential impact on global markets, where automation is streamlining labor-intensive sectors like fishing and shipping.
Previously, the main challenge in hiring hundreds of professionals — from captains and mechanics to cooks and deckhands — was the need to manually complete extensive application forms with dozens of fields. This process overloaded HR departments and often introduced errors, delaying crew deployment. Year-round fishing operations in the Bering and Okhotsk Seas require fast crew rotations, making every delay critical.
The new solution eliminates this bottleneck. The AI accurately recognizes both printed and handwritten text across all document types. The system only requires a standard office scanner, and all data processing occurs on the company’s internal servers, ensuring full data protection without cloud storage or third-party access, according to Kiosksoft.
The Smart Engines lightweight neural networks do not rely on high-powered GPUs and can run on standard server infrastructure, processing up to 100 document sets per minute — a level of performance unmatched in similar enterprise-grade systems.
