From chatbots to pilot announcements, AI is starting to gain traction

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 coordinating a lot of the work that you, as a passenger, will hopefully never notice. Is there still space for carry-on bags? 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 by text and in the United app. Most of the time, that message is generated by AI. Meanwhile, in offices around the world, dispatchers are looking at this real-time data to ensure that the crew can still legally fly the plane without running afoul of FAA regulations. And only a few weeks ago, United turned on its AI customer service chatbot.

Jason Birnbaum, who became United’s CIO in 2022, manages a team of over 1,500 employees and about 2,000 contractors who are responsible for all of the tech that makes this happen.

Every flight has an AI story

United is quite bullish on AI, Birnbaum said. “I think the travel industry has so many different examples of where AI can be used both for the customer and for the employees.” One of those is United’s “Every flight has a story.”

Not that long ago, it was rather typical to get a notification when a flight was delayed, but no further information about it. Maybe the incoming flight was delayed. Maybe there was a maintenance issue. A few years ago, United started using agents to write short notices that explained the delay and sent those out through its app and as text messages. Now, pulling in data from its chat app and other sources, the vast majority of these messages are written by AI.

AI for pilots?

After creating the system that automatically writes the delay “stories” in the app, Birnbaum’s team is now thinking about where it can use the same generative AI technology. One area: those short briefings pilots usually give before takeoff.

“A 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, everybody going to Las Vegas, blah blah.”’ And he said, ‘Some pilots are introverted; could you have an AI engine that helps me generate an announcement on the plane about where I’m going so that I could give a really good announcement about what’s happening?’ And I thought that was a great use case.”

Another area where generative AI may help pilots is in summarizing complex technical documents. But as Birnbaum rightly noted, everything that involves the pilot flying the plane is heavily structured and regulated, so it’ll be a while before the airline will launch anything there.

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By Frederic Lardinois via TechCrunch