With a handful of notable exceptions, airline CEOs are a fairly measured bunch. So when you hear a chief executive predicting that “this will change everything,” it’s a good idea to pay attention. 

The topic causing a stir among aviation leaders is artificial intelligence. From low-cost airlines to five-star flag carriers, companies across the industry are making tentative steps toward an AI future.

To sort the high value from the hyperbole, Skift spoke with five CEOs to find out what the new technology is doing, and could soon be doing, for their businesses.

Airlines Get Smart on Waste

A win-win area for airlines in these relatively early AI days is waste reduction. Taking fewer items onboard might seem insignificant, but when multiplied across thousands of flights it can add up in a big way. It saves money and also benefits wider sustainability campaigns.

It’s a perspective shared by Marjan Rintel, CEO of KLM who told Skift: “We already have a team working on AI and they’re using it to reduce waste and weight on board for catering. What’s particularly exciting is that we’re now entering phase two of the project. We are learning exactly how much we need to bring on board and using AI to find out which meals are the favorites. This allows us to adjust our ordering which is already reducing a lot of waste.”

If KLM’s crackdown on surplus spaghetti doesn’t get you excited, speak to Güliz Öztürk. She’s the CEO of Turkish low-cost carrier Pegasus, and says the real-world applications of artificial intelligence are only just being realized: “Generative AI will change everything within five to six years. It will not take another decade, I’m sure of that. I think we will remember today and say, how come we couldn’t think of this?”

Öztürk acknowledged that there could be some existing jobs lost to AI, but the technology should also offer new opportunities for net growth. “I’m not thinking about the bad side of it. Maybe we can see some negatives, there may be some roles to be transferred, but other roles will be created.”

Customer Service Improvements

The Pegasus chief argues that in many respects, the future is already here with AI initiatives gradually being rolled out across the business. “We’ve started a program called FlyGPT in which we’re identifying the use cases for generative AI. For example, I can foresee customer experience changing. Passengers will be able to reach the information they need very easily – maybe the call centers will have AI speaking with them.”

Öztürk identified maintenance, flight operations, and weather forecasting as further areas where next-generation AI products could add real value. Looking even further ahead, the CEO even suggested that AI could prove helpful during the flight itself. 

“There are very exciting things as we move forward. I’m looking at AI from a positive perspective, one that will bring more productivity.” 

‘It’s Not Only Chatbots’

This push to do things more smartly is echoed by Annette Mann, CEO of Austrian Airlines.

Speaking to Skift, she reeled off several large departments within the carrier where AI is already being harnessed: “We’re working on predictive maintenance, our operations center, plus we’re looking into customer service too – but it’s not only chatbots. It’s about supporting our staff with the decision-making and the right information they need to improve efficiency.

“We’re also looking at it in a marketing context. It’s a big field where, for example, you can massively improve newsletter management. In the past, one person was writing newsletters and it was not so targeted. Now we can use customer data to deliver much more aligned content,” said the Austrian CEO.

Visibly excited by its potential, Mann described the range of possible AI applications as “huge.” However, she was more cautious in managing expectations around the nature of its integration: “There is not one big breakthrough with AI. Instead, it is a lot of hard effort – you try and test to find out what works.”

Going Beyond the Generic

Asked what she would love to see AI do in the medium term, Mann said the technology’s move beyond linear tasks is on her radar: “At the moment, we can chat to ChatGPT and it’ll solve our very generic problems. If I need a three-page summary on Napoleon, it’s fantastic – but what about more specific projects? What if I need a new press release written? It’s about the ability to feed AI detailed tasks using company data and style and having it take that next step. I would love for it to become a real assistant beyond the generics and I honestly don’t think that’s too far away.”

Con Korfiatis, the new chief executive of Oman Air was similarly positive on how the new technology could benefit his business and its customers.

“AI is absolutely on our radar – it has potential uses in so, so, many ways. A lot is going on behind the scenes in this space and I honestly don’t think we know its full potential yet.

“Every day we are learning new possibilities and how it can help us in every aspect of our business. Be it in operations, strategy, or planning. It has limitless possibilities and it’s a very exciting era we’re coming into,” added Korfiatis.

The AI Airline Pioneers

Long before AI entered the everyday lexicon, a handful of aviation companies were already tapping into the tech.

Jeremy Bowen, CEO of flight analytics firm Cirium heads a business that uses AI all day everyday to boost operational quality and efficiency for airline clients. “There’s that widely used cliché that we use a lot within Cirium. It’s that your job is not going to be replaced by AI, your job is going to be replaced by somebody using AI. We think from the aviation perspective that we can make anyone with an aviation desk job more efficient. What do I mean by desk job? They’re taking different datasets, they’re looking at what they should be doing. We think that’s where we come into it.”

For Bowen and his team, the scale of the challenge is such that a one-size AI template isn’t an option. “We’ve got that much data, it’s very difficult to apply a single AI model – it simply doesn’t work. Our strategy is to break our data down to look at the different elements to have an AI expert within each of the sectors. You then have a conductor over the top that brings it together.

“We want to be in a situation where if you have a question that might have taken 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 number of questions backward and forwards we think that’s going to be the answer. It all comes down to productivity.”

Amid fears in some quarters that AI could be net-negative for employees if not employers, Bowen struck an upbeat note. He believes that the bandwidth afforded by AI could be used for good: “We’re all in the aviation industry because we love it, but it’s not an easy business to be in, even at the best of times. So anything that AI can do to help free up people’s time is positive.

“It could help to create a bit more margin that people can invest in sustainable aviation fuels or update equipment to make it greener. We need to make people’s lives easier and cut their time down so they’ve got more time and be able to solve the real issues that they have within an airline.”

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