With the world being more focused on digitization, it is more and more important that the aviation industry stays develops itself to stay attractive to its customers. There are many points for improvement that have not been implemented yet but could definitely enhance the customer experience by becoming more ‘digital’.
One thing is that flights are poorly scheduled, which is a big cause for accidents involving multiple airplanes. This can be solved by implementing voice recognition and machine learning to improve flight schedules and communication with airports. Maybe in the future, pilots are not needed at all anymore, but it is doubtful whether customers are willing to enter an airplane without a pilot.
With AI big data can be made sense of. There is a large volume of data already present in the aviation industry but it can be used better to save costs. Being able to predict turbulence is one example. When making better weather predictions, this can be avoided so travelling becomes safer and flights will be more punctual. Maintenance will also be less needed and thus save costs. Using real time data here with the help of AI could save the aviation industry a lot of trouble.
With collecting more and more data comes the risk of cyberattacks. Passenger and flight data must be protected with cybersecurity, which can be improved as well with AI. When using this data in a appropriate way, passenger details can be used to predict future travel flows. There are even opportunities to improve customer service with AI by using machine learning and making chatbots more human like.
The question is how passengers will react to this huge collection of passenger data and how it is used for improving the customer experience.
Harsh, A., 2018. How AI Will Revolutionize The Aviation And Airport Industry. Linkedin. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-ai-revolutionize-aviation-airport-industry-anurag-harsh/
Hi Nicole,
Interesting post! Personally, I think the opportunities that come with AI are vast and some still unexplored in certain industries. AI has been present in aviation, especially in terms of security and safety, yet it is not one of the most recognised industries for this. With the current pandemic, I wonder how the industry will continue to develop or implement AI? Obviously it will first have to recover, given the vast reduction in flights and consumer interests. What do you think about this?
Hi Olivia,
I personally think that the pandemic will increase the speed with which AI will be implemented, after off course it has recovered. Consumer needs are changing very fast now.
For example, airports could become platforms on which all kinds of information could be gathered to show passengers where to drop their luggage, changes in flight schedules, etc. This would improve the customer experience I think as you do not need to be at an airport very early and you can be notified when something changes for instance. I am also wondering if people would travel more once everything goes ‘back to normal’. Either they might still be scared of virusses or they want to catch up on what they missed out on.
Hi Nicole,
I think you gave some really nice insights about the possibilites of AI in the aviation industry. Airlines nowadays already use some very extingsive prediction models, but as you mentioned, some major improvements can still be made.
What I wanted to add to your blog contribution is that also within the Engineering and Maintenance department, a lot of AI is used already. Within KLM for example, they use an AI based algorithm to predict the maintanance moments of each aircraft. Normally this could have been occured when flying, or when grounded in another country outside of The Netherlands. This costs a lot of time, delays and money. Now that they have better AI based (including ML) prediction models in place, they are better capable of fixing the aircraft in Amsterdam, which results in less delays, and greater operational performances of the aircraft.
Do you think that this will be used in the entire industry later on?