Redefining the future of aviation tech with Gen AI

Many businesses today are struggling to adapt to the dynamic market, driven by the rapid pace of technological change. We are all experiencing a huge digital wave, and these futuristic technologies are gaining popularity, opening new possibilities, and providing optimism and hopes of turning businesses around completely. What’s fueling these technologies is the vast amounts of data generated from multiple sources that are readily available to be dissected in many ways, again, through smart and intelligent tools. 

New-age tech is redefining the parameters of excellence

First, we need to understand how these futuristic technologies are reinventing the three key aspects of excellence for airlines.

Creativity

Technology today is pushing the boundaries of creativity by helping generate unique concepts and thus offering creative solutions. This is possible due to the availability and analysis of vast amounts of data and patterns. Airlines are now exposed to valuable data insights like never before, which have opened the doors to exploring innovative perspectives that humans may not have considered. 

Productivity

By automating repetitive work, helping manage schedules efficiently, and streamlining workflows through advanced tools and technologies, airline staff is now able to concentrate on high-value, critical tasks that require human creativity and decision-making. 

Proactivity

Valuable insights drawn through powerful data analysis tools can work volumes in making airlines proactive. By anticipating needs, identifying trends, and making real-time recommendations, airlines can easily stay ahead of the curve, manage deadlines, foresee potential challenges, and suggest pre-emptive actions to optimize outcomes.

New-age technologies today unleash limitless opportunities for businesses to be creative, productive, and proactive.

Challenges faced by the airline industry

In this cut-throat competitive business, airlines must realize the existing constraints and align their current systems accordingly. Once this is achieved, both customer experience outputs and revenue will see a significant growth. Also, analyzing the gaps and better strategizing will lead to efficient operations, thereby, keeping the costs in check. Let’s reflect on the challenges faced by the airline industry with regard to customers and operations. 

Customer-side challenges

The traditional digital platforms airlines rely on are often neither intuitive nor interactive, leading to a frustrating experience for travelers. In the times of hyper personalization and digital convenience these platforms typically require customers to perform multiple actions on their own, with little to no guidance, creating a cumbersome and time-consuming process. From booking a flight, completing web check-in, selecting seats or meals, to arranging for special services like wheelchair assistance, passengers are forced to navigate through long and complex booking forms with minimal support.

Beyond digital interaction, the struggles continue during the physical travel experience as well. Today, passengers often experience anxiety before catching a flight. They may reach the airport hours in advance, only to struggle through long queues and wait times. This stress takes away the excitement of travel, turning it into a painful experience rather than a pleasurable one. Poor communication from airlines compounds these challenges—flight updates, delays, gate change, baggage handling, etc. are frequently communicated late or in unclear terms, leaving travelers frustrated and anxious. Moreover, passengers are increasingly dissatisfied with one-size-fits-all products and services that fail to offer the personalized experiences they now expect.

We envision boarding a plane to be as simple as boarding a bus. This can be achieved by utilizing the latest tech and letting passengers take control of their journey. 

Operational challenges

Keeping an airline profitable while delivering the best-in-class service, ensuring on-time departures, and being sustainable at the same time is a big challenge. Airlines face numerous day-to-day operational complexities such as:

• identifying the best routes & slots,
• managing the right pricing point,
• choosing aircraft assignments, and,
• deploying the right set of crew to ensure safe flight operations.  

These challenges (rescheduling, managing passenger communication, handling baggage, coordinating connecting flights, and ensuring crew and aircraft availability) get more complex particularly during periods of disruption.

The airline ecosystem has various value chains which are supported by a plethora of good digital/OEM products by renowned providers like SITA, Amadeus, Sabre, Jappensen, AIMS, Inform, etc. These products individually support a few objectives of airline operations like rostering, departure control, revenue management, resource planning, and crew management. Despite having robust tools, airlines lack a unified, end-to-end operational view, limiting their ability to identify impactful areas for improvement and adapt effectively to disruptions. 

With the right technology like Gen AI, airlines can transform these challenges into opportunities for improvement, driving smarter, more agile operations. 

 

Overcoming these challenges with Gen AI

Generative AI integrates seamlessly with other advanced technologies, unlocking new, transformative use cases. Let’s take a look at some use cases that could be the game changer when Gen AI is combined with NLP and the metaverse.

Customer experience

Use case 1: Redefining the future of websites

Speaking of language models, Natural Language Processing (NLP), along with Gen AI, can completely transform the airline's customer experience. 

With NLP, airlines can enhance customer interactions by bringing forth a more natural and intuitive communication. Imagine an airline website where, instead of navigating through numerous options, users can simply speak their requests, and the website adapts in real time to provide tailored content without overwhelming them with irrelevant information. This personalized, voice-driven interface could be the future of airline websites.  

Further, when integrated with the metaverse, it can even simulate different travel scenarios based on customer preferences. Customers can explore the different destinations, airlines, and flight options in a virtual, highly immersive, and interactive environment. They could try out different seating options, explore in-flight amenities, and even visualize their entire travel experience beforehand. 

These technologies can significantly enhance customer experiences, especially shopping experiences, and indirectly fuel more revenue growth. 

Use case 2:  Enabling seamless passenger experience  

Delivering a frictionless passenger experience is a shared goal of both airports and airlines. However, lack of effective and timely data sharing between these two stakeholders often results in a disjointed experience for passengers.

To bridge the gap, airlines and airports need to collaborate and establish a shared, comprehensive view of the passenger journey enabled through real time data sharing. Based on this foundation, we can leverage Gen AI driven use cases to design an intuitive travel navigator that will bridge all the touch points managed by both airline or airport independently and provide a transparency in effective passenger and baggage handling at the airport.

Beyond the regular travel services, this navigator can identify issues without passengers needing to report it and will adapt in real time to help passengers handle stressful situations like baggage delays, lost, or damaged. In such cases the navigator can automatically create a Property Irregular Report (PIR) and help passengers through every touch point (by creating an interactive workflow) until the issue is resolved.

The navigator can be further customized to handle other scenarios like last minute gate changes. This can be done by displaying an interactive airport map to navigate between gates simultaneously by pushing all updates on wait times and flight timings.

On the operations front, both the stakeholders can define a more accurate Predictive Off Block Time (POBT) and Target Off Block Time (TOBT). This precision will enhance operational planning and improve overall on-time performance (OTP). This approach will also enable them to have a better visibility on passenger distribution across terminal and airside, enabling effective gate allocation and utilizations.

By optimizing these processes airlines and airports can significantly reduce the occurrences of gate no-shows, contributing to smoother operations.

Gen AI-led innovations in airline technology around the world

Now, let’s reflect on how technologies like Gen AI can enable airlines meet the demands of modern aviation operations while being creative, productive, and proactive at the same time.

As per a 2023 SITA report that examines 12 emerging trends that will influence the travel industry by 2033, 97% of companies are planning to develop Gen AI.

Another report by IATA lists several airline industry use cases related to Gen AI that were discussed in the Innovation Day 2023 event, with significant light thrown on opportunities and risks. From customized offers and orders to dynamic pricing, workforce training, travel agent support, and language support models, the discussion covered a wide range of topics, thus highlighting the magnitude at which Gen AI is being perceived in the industry.

Several leading airlines today are using Gen AI to become digital-first.

Let's examine some interesting examples of airlines leveraging Gen AI.

JetBlue

One of the most data-driven airlines globally, JetBlue heavily relies on new-age technologies such as AI and machine learning. By using AI in combination with platforms like Databricks Lakehouse, JetBlue creates a unified digital twin of its business by integrating data across operations, commercial functions, and customer support. This helps JetBlue identify the gaps in real time, improving the overall operational flow and decision-making.​ (Source: Constellation Research Inc.).

Singapore Airlines

Known for its high service standards, Singapore Airlines has integrated Generative AI into its various processes leading to 140 use cases that has resulted in boosting operations, revenue growth, productivity and customer experience. One prominent upgrade was the enhancement of the organization's website with a Gen AI-powered search functionality for seamless and accurate results. This led to a significant improvement in customer experience. Another crucial change by the airline was the introduction of JARVIS, an intelligent Gen AI-driven staff assistant launched to augment staff productivity.  (Source: Singapore Airlines Annual Report 2023-24).

Lufthansa

Lufthansa, another prominent player in the global airline industry, has experimenting with Gen AI to enhance various services and processes such as a NLP prototype (to automate manual referencing between Aircraft Manitenance Tasks) for Lufthansa Technik, the Eurowings Holidays AI travel advisor called 'Holly', a ChatGPT-powered packing list generator prototype, LLM to standardize flight planning data like NOTAMs, supporting current chatbot Elisa with ChatGPT, etc.​ (Source: Innovation Runway, Lufthansa Group).

Additionally, to reduce errors during maintenance, some airlines are planning to deploy AI learning models in live video feed during airline maintenance activities that will flag issues for managers to evaluate and resolve. 

Businesses that have identified Gen AI’s immense potential and have started executing growth strategies with Gen AI are already in the lead to a smarter, more intelligent airline ecosystem. Air India, a flag carrier of India, recently launched AI.g, a Gen AI-powered virtual assistant through which the airline has been able to manage approximately 30,000 queries on a daily basis.  

That said, almost 97% of airlines globally are now thinking of developing Gen AI-driven solutions and enhance their operational as well as customer-centric processes. Enabling smart and intelligent aviation is the need of the hour, and as customers are demanding a more tech-savvy approach, airlines are buckling up promptly and undergoing impressive changes to match expectations. 

If you are already on the path to transformation and want to accelerate your journey or want to understand how these futuristic technologies can transform your existing airline business, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn (via the Connect link below our author pics) or express your interest by getting in touch with our airline experts here.