When you board a United Airlines plane, the gate agents, flight attendants and others involved in making sure your plane leaves on time are in a chatroom that coordinates many of the tasks that you, the passenger, hopefully never notice . Is there still room for hand luggage? Did the caterer bring the missing orange juice? Is there a way to seat a family together?
When a flight is delayed, a message with an explanation will arrive via text and on the United app. Most of the time, this message is generated by AI. Meanwhile, in offices around the world, dispatchers review this data in real time to ensure the crew can legally fly the plane without violating FAA regulations. And just a few weeks ago, United activated its AI-powered customer service chatbot.
Jason Birnbaum, who became United’s CIO in 2022, manages a team of more than 1,500 employees and about 2,000 contractors who are responsible for all the technology that makes this happen.
“What I love about our business is also what you hate about the business,” he told me in a recent interview. “I was at GE for many years in the appliance business. we could go down for a day, i don’t think anyone will notice. It would be: “Okay, dishwashers don’t come off the line.” But it wasn’t remarkable. Now if something happens, even for 15 minutes, not only is it all over social media, but the news trucks are headed to the airport.”
Before joining United, Birnbaum spent 16 years at GE, rising from chief technology officer to CIO of GE Consumer and Industrial, based in Budapest. In 2009, he became the CI of GE Healthcare Global Supply Chain. He joined United in 2015 as SVP of Digital Technology, where he was responsible for launching projects like ConnectionSaver, one of United’s first AI/ML-based services that will proactively run flights when passengers have tight connections (and this saved me from spending 12 hours at SFO last week).
I wanted to talk to Birnbaum about how he — and other CIOs in global enterprises — think about the use of artificial intelligence. This is an area of innovation that the airline is looking at. But before we can talk about AI, United is also in the process of moving services to the cloud. If there’s one trend in cloud computing right now, it’s that everyone is trying to optimize their cloud infrastructure and spend less.
United Continental Airlines YR202 3490 (CAL) 737-800 BSI internal. Image Credits: United
“I’m starting to see these companies and startups that are, ‘How do you optimize your cloud and how do you manage your cloud?’ There are many people who focus on questions like “You have a lot of data, can I store it better for you?” Or, ‘You have a lot of new apps. can I help you keep track of them better?’ Because all the tools you had don’t work anymore,” he said. Perhaps the era of digital transformation is over, he said, and we are now in the era of cloud optimization.
United itself has bet heavily on the cloud, especially AWS preferred cloud provider. Unsurprisingly, United is also looking at how the company can optimize its use of the cloud, both in terms of cost and reliability. As for so many companies going through this process, this also means looking at developer productivity and adding automation and DevOps practices to the mix. “It’s been there. We have an established presence [in the cloud]but now we’re kind of in the market to try to continue to optimize as well,” Birnbaum said.
But this also comes back to reliability. Like all airlines, United still operates many legacy systems — and they still do. “Honestly, we’re being very careful as we go on this journey to make sure we don’t disrupt the business or create self-inflicted wounds,” he said.
United has already moved and disabled many legacy systems and that process is ongoing. Later this year, for example, the company will shut down a large Unisys-based system. But Birnbaum also believes United will continue to have on-prem systems. “I just want to be in the best places for apps and user experience,” he said, whether for performance, privacy or security reasons.
The one thing the company isn’t trying to create, however, is some kind of overarching Unified Platform that will run all of its systems. But there is too much complexity in the day-to-day operations of airlines to do that, Birnbaum said. Some platforms manage, for example, reservations, ticketing and baggage tracking, while others handle crew assignments.
An employee at the United Airlines Station Operations Center at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. Image Credits: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg via Getty Images
When something goes wrong, these systems must also work together in near real time. This is also why United is betting on a cloud provider. “I don’t imagine we’ll have one platform,” Birnbaum said. “I think we’re going to get really good at connecting things and making apps talk to each other.”
In practice, this means that today it is possible for the team to see when the caterer got off the plane and who checked in for the flight, for example. And ground teams and cabin crews can see all of this through their internal chat app.
Every flight has an AI story
While all this work continues, United is also looking at how it can better leverage artificial intelligence.
A story I regularly hear about AI/ML in large enterprises is that ChatGPT didn’t necessarily change the way technologists thought about it, but that it suddenly became a boardroom conversation. That goes for United too.
“We had a pretty mature AI practice,” Birnbaum said when I asked him when he realized genetic AI was something the team needed to pay attention to. “We built a lot of capabilities to manage models, do tuning and all that. So the good news for us was that we had already made a pretty big investment in this feature. What changed [when ChatGPT arrived] it wasn’t that we had to take it seriously. It was who was asking: When the CEO and the board suddenly say, “Hey, I need to know more about this.”
United is quite bullish on AI, Birnbaum said. “I think the travel industry has so many different examples where AI can be used for both the customer and the employees.” One of them is United’s “Every Flight Has a Story.”
Not too long ago, it was rather common to get a notification when a flight was delayed, but no more information about it. Perhaps the inbound flight was delayed. Maybe there was a maintenance issue. A few years ago, United began using agents to write short notices explaining the delay and send them through its app and as text messages. Now, pulling data from the chat app and other sources, the vast majority of these messages are written by AI.
Similarly, United is also looking at using genetic AI to summarize flight information for its operations teams so they can have a quick overview of what’s going on.
United Airlines Flight Information Board. Image Credits: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
Just a few weeks ago, United fully transitioned its United.com chat system to an AI agent, too. In my own testing, this system was still quite limited, but it’s only a start, Birnbaum said.
Air Canada famously once used an AI bot that sometimes he gave wrong answers, but Birnbaum said he wasn’t too worried about it. Technically, the bot is based on United’s knowledge base, which should keep hallucinations under control. “But to me [the Air Canada incident] it wasn’t a technology failure, it was a customer service failure because — and I won’t comment too much — but I would say that today our human agents are also giving us the wrong answers. We just have to deal with it and move on. I think we are very prepared for this situation,” Birnbaum said.
Later this year, United also plans to launch a tool currently called “Get Me Close.” Often, when there is a delay, customers are willing to change their plans to transfer to a nearby airport. I once had United switch me on a flight to Amsterdam when my flight to Berlin was canceled (not that close, but close enough to catch a train and still coordinate a central session the next morning).
“While our mobile tools are great—and they are great—when people go to talk to people, the interactions are usually more about creating optional features. That means you’ll say, “Well, your flight was delayed,” and then someone might say, “Well, could you take me to Philadelphia instead of New York? Can you reach me? We think interaction is a great case. of use for artificial intelligence’.
AI for pilots?
After building the system that automatically writes the delay “stories” into the app, Birnbaum’s team is now thinking about where they can use the same genetic AI technology. One area: those brief briefings that pilots usually give before takeoff.
“One pilot actually came up to me and said, ‘One of the things that some pilots are great at is getting on that speaker and saying, ‘Hey, welcome, you’re all going to Las Vegas, blah blah.’ And he said. “Some pilots are introverts. could you have an AI engine that helps me create an announcement on the plane about where I’m going so I can give a really good announcement about what’s going on?’ And I thought that was a great use case.”
As it turns out, one of the main drivers of customer satisfaction for airlines is actually pilot interaction. A few years ago, United started focusing on her Net Promoter Score and required pilots to make announcements about delays while standing at the front of the cockpit, for example. It makes sense for the airline to consider how it can improve such a critical interaction — while hopefully still allowing pilots to go off script.
Another area where genetic AI can help pilots is in summarizing complex technical documents. But, as Birnbaum rightly noted, anything that involves the pilot flying the plane is heavily structured and regulated, so it will be a while before the airline starts anything there.
