With a few notable exceptions, airline CEOs are a pretty level-headed bunch, so when you hear a chief executive predict, “this is going to change everything,” pay close attention.
The topic currently making waves in the aviation industry is artificial intelligence. From budget airlines to five-star carriers, companies across the industry are taking cautious steps toward an AI future.
To separate the high value from the exaggeration, Skift spoke to five CEOs to find out what the new technology does and could soon do for their companies.
Airlines are dealing with waste more intelligently
In these relatively early days of artificial intelligence, reducing waste is a win-win for airlines. Carrying fewer items on board may seem insignificant, but extrapolated across thousands of flights, it can add up enormously. It saves money and also benefits broader sustainability campaigns.
This view is shared by Marjan Rintel, CEO of KLM, who said: Skift: “We already have a team working on AI and using it to reduce waste and weight in onboard catering. What’s particularly exciting is that we are now entering the second phase of the project. We are learning exactly how much we need to bring on board and using AI to find out which dishes are the favorites. This allows us to customize our orders, which is already reducing a lot of waste.”
If KLM’s approach to excess spaghetti doesn’t excite you, talk to Güliz Öztürk. She is CEO of Turkish budget airline Pegasus and says the practical applications of artificial intelligence are only just being realized: “Generative AI will change everything within five to six years. It won’t take another decade, I’m sure. I think we’ll look back on today and say: how come we didn’t think of this?”
Öztürk acknowledged that AI could lead to the loss of some existing jobs, but that the technology should also offer new opportunities for net growth. “I’m not thinking about the negative side. Maybe we’ll see some negative aspects, some jobs might be transferred, but other jobs will be created.”
Improvements in customer service
The Pegasus boss argues that in many ways the future is already here, as AI initiatives are gradually being rolled out across the company. “We have started a program called FlyGPT where we identify the use cases for generative AI. For example, I can foresee that the customer experience will change. Passengers will be able to get the information they need very easily – perhaps in the call centers, AI will talk to them.”
Öztürk identified maintenance, flight operations and weather forecasting as other areas where next-generation AI products could add real value. Looking to the future, the CEO even suggested that AI could prove helpful during the flight itself.
“There are very exciting things ahead. I see AI from a positive perspective, one that will bring more productivity.”
“It’s not just chatbots”
This urge to do things smarter is also supported by Annette Mann, CEO of Austrian Airlines.
In conversation with SkiftShe listed several major departments within the airline where AI is already being used: “We are working on predictive maintenance, on our operations center, and we are also dealing with customer service – but it’s not just about chatbots. It’s about supporting our employees in decision-making and giving them the right information they need to improve efficiency.”
“We also look at this in a marketing context. This is a large field in which, for example, newsletter management can be massively improved. In the past, one person wrote newsletters and that wasn’t very targeted. Now we can use customer data to provide much more targeted content,” said the Austrian CEO.
Clearly excited about the potential of AI, Mann described the range of possible applications as “huge.” However, she was more cautious in managing expectations about how they will be integrated: “With AI, there is no big breakthrough. Instead, it takes a lot of hard work – you try and test to find out what works.”
Going beyond the generic
When asked what she hopes AI will do in the medium term, Mann said she has her sights set on developing the technology beyond linear tasks: “Right now we can chat with ChatGPT and it will solve our very general problems. If I need a three-page summary on Napoleon, it’s fantastic – but what about more specific projects? What if I need to write a new press release? It’s about the ability to feed AI detailed tasks using company data and style and have it take the next step. I would love to see it become a real assistant that goes beyond general tasks and I honestly don’t think that’s too far away.”
Con Korfiatis, Oman Air’s new CEO, was similarly positive about the benefits the new technology will bring to his company and its customers.
“AI is absolutely on our radar – it has so many potential uses. There is a lot going on behind the scenes in this area and I honestly don’t think we know its full potential yet.
“Every day we learn about new opportunities and how they can help us in every aspect of our business. Be it operations, strategy or planning. The possibilities are endless and we are entering a very exciting era,” added Korfiatis.
The AI airline pioneers
Long before AI became part of everyday language, some aviation companies were already using this technology.
Jeremy Bowen, CEO of flight analytics company Cirium, runs a company that uses AI throughout the day to improve operational quality and efficiency for airline clients. “There’s this common cliché that we often use at Cirium, which says your job isn’t going to be replaced by AI, it’s going to be replaced by someone who with AI. From an aviation perspective, we believe we can make anyone who has a desk job in aviation more efficient. What do I mean by desk job? They take different data sets and think about what they should do. We think that’s where we come in.”
For Bowen and his team, the challenge is so great that a one-size-fits-all AI template is not an option. “We have so much data that it’s very difficult to apply a single AI model – it just doesn’t work. Our strategy is to break down our data to look at the different elements and have an AI expert in each sector. Then there’s a conductor on top of that who brings it all together.
“We want to be able to answer a question that might have taken us three days to answer – we don’t want to be the fastest – but if we can answer it in two hours by asking you a series of questions back and forth, we believe that will be the answer. It all comes down to productivity.”
There are fears in some circles that AI could have negative consequences for employees or even employers. However, Bowen is optimistic. He believes that the bandwidth that AI offers could be used for good: “We’re all in the aviation industry because we love it, but it’s not an easy business, even at the best of times. So anything that AI can help give people more time is positive.”
“It might help to create a little more scope for people to invest in sustainable aviation fuels or upgrade equipment to make it more environmentally friendly. We need to make people’s lives easier and save them time so they have more time to solve the real problems they have with an airline.”
Check out the highlights from Skift Data + AI Summit 2024:
