What a 120-Year-Old Ship Supplier Taught Me About AI

About two years ago, I was visiting with my dad, Don Rush, a fourth-generation ship supplier at Delaware Ship Supply. I had spent the previous four years building a venture-backed AI education company used by 600 colleges and universities across North America.

Something struck me.

The segment I had spent the last 15 years working in, the US tech industry with many of the world's largest companies, was completely redesigning the way it worked because of AI. Those closest to the edge of innovation were redefining roles, rebuilding teams and deploying fundamentally new operating models.

Meanwhile, my dad's 120-year-old family business remained focused on serving ships through time-tested workflows that had not changed in decades.

Change was not obvious. Business was good. The company had an exceptional reputation, a loyal team and a healthy P&L. But the way quotes were completed, orders were accepted and items were sourced was largely unchanged. Key employees had been with the company for decades. And despite using a well-known ERP system, there were artifacts of an old process: calculators, stacks of paper and expensive hardware.

I grew curious about bringing what I knew from one world into the other. I also knew I needed to tread carefully. The 36-year-old son of the boss arriving with new technology to fix everything is enough to make any team roll its eyes.

So before building anything, I spent a few months redoing every employee's work: completing quotes, accepting orders, studying the data and asking questions.

The problem began to surface. Thirty years of rich data existed in the company's database, and employees had decades of experience, but neither was helping the team work much faster or more strategically. Employees were buried in routine manual work, while the data was used mainly to record the past rather than inform the next decision.

When I asked my dad whether we could experiment with automation and AI in quoting, his reaction was appropriately skeptical. He did not care how impressive AI was. Anything we implemented had to reduce work and retain service quality without adding complexity.

When I first arrived, Delaware Ship Supply averaged about 104 minutes of human completion time for a 250-plus-line provisions quote.

Much of that involved scanning customer emails, downloading attachments, translating requests into internal inventory data, converting quantities and units, applying customer-specific pricing and returning the prices in the customer's original format.

I started by automating data entry. Through a combination of modern workflow automation and targeted AI, I was able to turn external requests into consistently organized, usable data. Then I used AI to translate messy customer requests, supplier descriptions, quantities, units and special handling instructions into real inventory data, costs and prices. I built it around a core memory infrastructure created from human decisions, with those decisions remaining the source of truth.

While AI handles inconsistent language, recognizes patterns and resolves ambiguity, conventional software controls calculations, pricing rules, permissions and auditability.

Most importantly, the workflow separates routine processing from work requiring expert judgment. Instead of asking a quoter to recheck 250 lines, it flags the few where uncertainty, risk or commercial context calls for a person.

This experiment would become Breakwater.

Eventually, the same 250-line quote took about five minutes to complete. Roughly 97% of the quote was driven by memory and AI, with the remainder marked for human review. Not only was processing the data more automated, but the entire quote could be completed without ever opening Excel.

In addition to quoting dramatically faster, the team was also sending more quotes, responding to vessels on tighter turnarounds and winning more business.

Over the next two years, Breakwater grew into a real company, with a team of dedicated AI experts focused exclusively on ship supply. We have since worked with companies of all shapes and sizes, from suppliers manually processing hundreds of quotes a day in modern ERP systems to teams already experimenting with AI themselves.

Although the technology has varied, the underlying reality has remained remarkably consistent: workflows that have changed little in decades, with people still doing too much of the routine work.

By redesigning how employees work with automation and AI, we have reduced quote completion time by more than 90% for every customer that has gone live with Breakwater to date.

From that work, three things became clear.

Manual quoting costs more than it looks. Completing a quote means scanning portals and company inboxes, reading spreadsheets, entering data and translating customer requests into prices. By redesigning the workflow around the steps that truly require human judgment, a supplier can process more quotes, respond faster and compete more effectively.

Most suppliers already have more pricing intelligence than they can use. Years of cost data, customer behavior, prior quotes and commercial judgment are scattered across systems and people. The challenge is putting that information to work. AI can bring the right context together in time to act, helping any employee price more strategically with the insight an industry veteran would naturally bring.

Blue-chip technology costs money and time. Deploying a well-known ERP may feel like the safest choice. But the hidden cost is often slow progress and a system that never deeply understands the realities of ship supply. Add expensive hardware, ongoing IT support and endless add-ons, and the true cost rises quickly. Cutting-edge technology can redirect that same spend toward a connected workflow that creates capacity and profit while fitting a ship supplier's operation like a glove.

When a quoter corrects something completed by AI, whether an item match, unit conversion, supplier choice or pricing exception, that decision is no longer static data.

Every edit improves future transactions by informing and training AI over time. In AI speak this is called a continuous learning loop. Embedding it directly into a daily workflow is what makes AI tools feel like magic.

This turns an experienced employee's judgment into automatic processing so future work can benefit directly from it. By deploying the same infrastructure into other workflows like purchase-order acceptance, technical RFQ screening, procurement, cost updates from messy supplier PDFs and inventory planning, a ship supplier can quickly be on the newest frontier of AI.

Some early customers have gone further and replaced ERP systems they never thought they could leave. By rebuilding the workflow from quote to cash, they have moved faster, improved accuracy and spent more time making strategic decisions instead of carrying every transaction through the day-to-day process.

The human impact has been just as meaningful.

One customer recently said he was having more fun running his business than ever before. Another said weekly calls were no longer necessary and that he planned to be on the golf course more.

In the future, I believe every ship supplier will barely recognize today's quote-to-cash workflow. Routine requests will move through pricing, purchasing, fulfillment and invoicing, with people stepping in for the decisions requiring real experience.

The warehouse may be the next frontier. AI will help business leaders make live strategic decisions and predict demand, supply constraints and seasonality with far greater accuracy. I expect a more responsive and resilient industry in which people spend less time moving information and more time serving customers and vessels.

In the two years since I began working with my dad, Delaware Ship Supply has achieved financial results it had not previously seen in its more than 120-year history. AI was not the whole story, but it removed a major operational constraint and helped make it possible for my dad to retire this year.

The opportunity is not to replace what has made established ship suppliers successful. It is to make decades of their knowledge available in every transaction and build the foundation for what comes next.

For a ship supplier who once told me, “I'm not that interested in AI,” to now say, “It's hard to believe this was possible,” that says it all.