Autonomous shipping is transitioning from trials to real-world operations in congested waterways, introducing new challenges in safety, assurance and regulatory integration. Drawing on operational autonomous vessel deployments, this presentation explores how modern autonomy systems combine multisensor fusion, COLREG-compliant collision avoidance and resilient remote operating frameworks to enable safe interaction with conventional maritime traffic. The presentation highlights practical lessons from live operations, including human-in-the-loop autonomy, system failover strategies and secure command-and-control architectures. It demonstrates how incremental, operationally driven deployment models are enabling scalable and commercially viable autonomous shipping in complex maritime environments.