Captain’s announcements and reading flight reports

Four airline CEOs showcased how they are integrating artificial intelligence deeply into their businesses at the IATA Congress 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, from customer experience to operational efficiency.

Güliz Öztürk of Pegasus Airlines shared that we have invested in an innovation lab in San Francisco, Silicon Valley in December two thousand and twenty three so that is very new and that innovation lab is working for technology scouting, bringing the technology from the startups over there into our processes, into our businesses. She shared that the captain announcement right we are having a captain announcement by AI on board and that is like already a year now and it is a technology we brought from Silicon Valley it is done by using the technology of voice cloning and that our chief pilot officer chief pilot talked about for an hour about his hobbies his interests in Turkish but with all the expressions his voice going up and down it is needed and then from that we have a cabin announcement now in Spanish in Arabic saying that you have landed to the second runway in his voice that the taxiway may take longer than expected so that announcement is made in his voice in our chief pilot is voice in Spanish and in Arabic with that technology.

Adrian Neuhauser of Abra Group shared that we are testing it all over the place as everyone is right but two major fronts where we are working on right now one is call centres where one of the things that is remarkably difficult in the call centre is consistency right as you optimise your processes you optimise your ticket rules etcetera you have got two thousand people at the call centre it is very hard for them to stay up to date as you change this right having AI accompanying them and ultimately checking every input that the client is requesting testing and making sure that it is consistent with your latest rules is one great tool and the other one is pricing where systems that are just better at looking at revenue management, thinking about demand and adjusting to demand.

Luis Rodrigues of TAP Air Portugal shared that thinking about the engines issue that we talked before we decided to be careful there so we first we wanted it to be adopted not imposed so we just started by buying the licenses and tell people go and play and in one month or two months tell me what you have achieved and there is a myriad of events and cases that people came up with and we thought we never thought about that and that we produce cabin reports thousands of them every week imagine having to read through all of them you just feed them into the machine and tell me what are the three key things and then we give that back to the crew and they are delighted because they know what they have to do now otherwise it would be impossible. He shared that if we do not give the example they will not follow it is as simple as that so we have to be there even if we are afraid and we do not know it we just go and learn it because it is not rocket science and the people will follow.

Con Korfiatis of Oman Air shared that to use a cliche word, digital first you have really got to fully adopt it and personify it and that for us we were overly dependent on indirect distribution in our airline as well and we were not able to control the customers or speak to them in the way that we wanted to so we put a lot of work into AI solutions for reaching out to customers directly, communicating with them the things that they want to see and hear and it has had a huge impact in terms of moving from indirect to direct sales over the last two years.