The recent extreme weather conditions impacting the United States have placed considerable strain on the nation's airline industry, leading to widespread schedule adjustments and route modifications that reverberate across international aviation.
During such periods of operational stress, carriers face an exponential increase in customer inquiries while simultaneously needing to make rapid, yet safety-compliant, operational decisions. To navigate these challenges, several prominent airlines are strategically adopting generative artificial intelligence solutions, transforming themselves into more agile and efficient organizations.
Airlines Embrace Generative AI for Operational Excellence
The integration of AI, particularly generative models, is proving instrumental in helping airlines respond effectively to unprecedented events. This shift enables faster processing of customer service requests and provides critical support for complex operational planning, ensuring continuity and safety.
Air France-KLM's AI Innovation Hub
Last year, Air France-KLM unveiled a sophisticated cloud-native generative AI platform, described as a 'factory,' designed for widespread organizational use. This initiative, a collaborative effort with Accenture and Google Cloud, aimed to standardize AI development and promote reusability across its operations. The airline reports significant measurable improvements across ground operations, engineering, maintenance, and various customer-facing departments. The partnership has indicated that the enterprise-wide deployment of generative AI has accelerated development cycles by over 35 percent.
This AI factory builds upon previous collaborative work between the airline and Accenture, which involved migrating essential applications to cloud infrastructure. Since then, Air France-KLM has developed proprietary AI tools, including a private assistant and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that link large language models with internal search capabilities. These tools assist in intricate tasks such as diagnosing and repairing aircraft damage. Furthermore, the organization invests in training its personnel, empowering employees to harness the capabilities of advanced AI for positive business impact.
United Airlines: Streamlining Customer Communication
United Airlines is similarly exploring the strategic application of AI within its operational framework. Jason Birnbaum, the company's CIO, highlighted in an interview that AI serves to "shorten decision cycles" during irregular operations, such as the recent flight disruptions caused by extreme cold weather. United's journey with AI began by focusing on automating responses to passenger inquiries.
When flights encounter delays or cancellations, customer service representatives must provide timely and informative updates while adhering to the company's prescribed communication style, refined through its 'Every Flight Has A Story' program. Sustaining this level of personalized output from human 'storytellers' becomes incredibly challenging during prolonged periods of widespread disruption.
Birnbaum explained that considering the vast number of delays compared to available personnel, it was impractical for individuals to craft a unique message for every single event. Therefore, the focus shifted to prioritizing the most impactful scenarios. Basic flight details, ongoing communications between crew members and ground staff, and supplementary data like weather forecasts are fed into an AI model to generate effective draft customer messages. The key challenge then involved fine-tuning the AI to grasp the nuances of United Airlines' communication preferences and desired emphasis. This process, known as prompt engineering, ensures the model uses specific terminology, for instance, highlighting safety without alarming passengers. Birnbaum also noted the AI's remarkable ability to retrieve historical flight data, providing customers with reasons for delays that human agents sometimes overlooked, adding significant value.
The Broader Impact of AI in Aviation
According to the Boston Consulting Group's assessment of AI maturity across industries, airlines have progressed from slightly below average to an 'average' standing in the past year. However, only one of the 36 airlines surveyed currently meets the highest readiness criteria for an AI-powered future. Analysis suggests that by 2030, carriers that embed AI deeply within their core workflows could achieve operating margins 5% to 6% points higher than their competitors.
Industry experts anticipate that generative AI will become an integral part of airline and airport operations, facilitating rapid decisions concerning schedules, crew assignments, aircraft rotations, and passenger recovery. Microsoft projects that data-driven AI systems have the potential to reduce the fundamental causes of flight delays by up to 35 percent through enhanced disruption forecasting, thereby limiting the cascading negative effects of operational disturbances. Furthermore, Microsoft reports that airlines employing AI-driven personalization strategies observe revenue increases ranging from 10% to 15% per passenger, while AI-based tools like self-service customer interfaces can yield cost reductions of up to 30 percent.
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Source: AI News
