AI in airline operations at the World Aviation Festival Talent Summit

In aviation, the COO role is now more digital-centric than ever before. Luckily, Air Transat’s Marc-Philippe Lumpé has, in his own words, ‘always been a bit of a tech nerd,’ so this trend towards greater digital knowhow plays to his interests and tastes anyway. However, it could mean problems are in store for old-school operations professionals. ‘I would argue that your regular COO will have to change, because this is really becoming a tech environment,’ Marc-Philippe says. ‘And if you’re not tech-savvy, you will be in trouble.’

Marc-Philippe shared these thoughts with our Aviation Director, James Parker, in the first of two fireside chats James hosted at the World Aviation Festival Talent Summit in Lisbon. The subject of this talk was, as James put it, ‘balancing and scaling automation with maintaining a human touch’. Or: ‘driving automation through people’. Rich topics for an aviation COO to discuss in 2025 – but what does Marc-Philippe make of the latest trends in tech and AI, and how will these affect talent and strategy in the industry?

Before you can talk about implementing AI solutions, however, you need to make sure your organisation has the right setup in place. Marc-Philippe notes that Air Transat has been rolling out their digital transformation over the past two years in preparation for their now-operational AI solutions in maintenance – where the company has a full predictive suite in place – as well as in operations control. For Marc-Philippe, ‘the holy grail’ has been simultaneous optimisation between aircraft crew and passengers through IROPs, allowing the airline ‘to break the rules in a smart way’ so that the system can propose solutions to human agents afterwards. He describes the programme as being ‘at the edge of [what is] technologically possible’, though monitoring its performance remains an ongoing project.

Convincing employees to embrace digital transformation is not always easy, Marc-Philippe admits. One way of bringing your talent on board so is to show ‘what’s in it for them, because if you deploy technology right, it makes people’s lives easier and also more fulfilling,’ he says. Thus, ‘you can take away a lot of the boring stuff.’ Generating the trust to show employees that they are not being replaced by AI or robots is key here, as is acknowledging the need to address such fears periodically throughout the transformation process. It also important that unions, particularly for areas such as flight operations, are kept informed and onside.

For Marc-Philippe, finding the right talent to enact this technological revamp has been less about recruiting than identifying and empowering current candidates – the ones ‘who actually like that stuff’ – to bring others on board. It helps that he has found cost-effective ways of funding Air Transat’s revamp: largely, by forming development partnerships with tech organisations. The airline is at a more advanced stage of the AI revolution than many other carriers, though their COO acknowledges that they are still just at the beginning of what this technology can do.

‘Today, we are putting AI solutions on top of existing processes, procedures, and systems,’ he explains. ‘What is going to change now is having the AI system at the centre.’ Marc-Philippe admits that rebooting the carrier’s operations centre to accommodate this while still running the business will be a significant challenge – he likens it to ‘running a marathon while having open-heart surgery’ – but it will be a necessary hardship if Air Transat wants to compete with the AI-native startup organisations of the future.

How can COOs or senior operations leaders adopt change at their organisations successfully? For Marc-Philippe, the key factors are to ‘embrace it and take your team with it.’ This is, of course, also a question of having the right people on board to support the mission: those who will understand that the technology is not being used against them.

However, recruitment and retention are ongoing issues in aviation. Beyond companies in the transport and travel sectors, organisations in areas like urban mobility and even drones are battling for the attention of the same candidate profiles, who may not grow up with the lifelong ambition of working in aviation that previously pulled so many to the industry. But Marc-Philippe disagrees – to a point.

‘The fascination that airlines have had in the past for a lot of young people is still there,’ he says. ‘But if you try to run a business and it’s not tech-savvy, it’s going to be boring and outdated to them.’ While Marc-Philippe has not recruited explicitly from outside the industry thus far, it is something he anticipates having to do soon as Air Transat scales its AI capabilities. Although he admits that the industry may need to do more – such as dialling down the use of acronyms, for one – to welcome outside hires, Marc-Philippe is confident that those who possess the right skillset and attitude can learn quickly.

Where others have expressed concerns over whether new recruits to the industry would subsequently leave – in contrast to the ‘lifers’ that have traditionally dominated aviation – Marc-Philippe believes that the sector’s fast pace will help to draw people in, rather than push them away. ‘I think the dynamic is what makes people stay, because it is a high-octane environment,’ he explains. ‘If you like the pressure and everything that comes with it, then I don’t think people are going to leave afterwards.’

Many thanks to Marc-Philippe for a wonderful and insightful conversation!

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