Airport Technology‘s editor sat down with Flyr’s chief product officer Sam Chamberlain to understand what the company has been working on with its partner airline, Riyadh Air.

Patrick Atack – Let’s start off with your AI tools now, how are they changing?

Sam Chamberlain, chief product officer at Flyr–  So going back to Flyr’s role in the industry, what we’re trying to achieve is the ability to provide the disruption airlines need to be able to innovate, to change their digital retail experiences. For airlines and their passengers, there’s a big question mark of now where AI fits into all of that.

So Flyr has been in the AI space, and we’ve been using AI in machine learning and making price predictions in our passenger revenue management products, things like this. That’s been around for a few years now, but we’re now looking at the shift to Agentic AI as that becomes more and more prevalent and it’s maturing.

So the rise of AI agents is happening thick and fast.

In the past with making a price recommendation based on feeding an AI model, a lot of history and a lot of signals, a lot of information that’s still important, that’s still a solid foundation of optimizing both revenue for the airline and the passenger experience.

But Agentic AI is now stepping into that place of making a decision, implementing those decisions automatically, and sort of monitoring and keeping an eye on what’s going on and being proactive. Making a recommendation, but implementing a recommendation.

Where we’re looking at that is in personalized offers space. So when a passenger is shopping, when they’re looking for air travel, and all the things around it, how does an AI agent make a smart recommendation of what is important to that passenger based on everything that’s happening in real-time?

So as you learn, as the agents learn about, well, what is the competition offering and what is important to this passenger? What device are they shopping on, and how long are they travelling for?

These AI agents are going to make more sort of tailored and smart recommendations in real-time, responsive to what feedback a passenger is providing.

PA – Do you see this linking up airlines and airports, for example, to smooth that chain and that passenger journey?

SC – Yeah, that’s a really good question, because historically airlines have, by virtue of the technology and constraints in place, really focused on passenger buying piece of the chain. So passenger comes and shops and wants this airfare and books this seat, and that’s mostly it. They might change the mind at some point, or their mind might be changed for them if there’s a schedule change or a disruption, some point they get to the airport, they get on the flight, and that’s it.

But that’s a small piece of the journey. There’s the inspiration coming up to travel before they even shop. We call that inspirational shopping like, how do you kind of start planting the seeds with travelers that this might be the ideal destination for you.

There are low off the low priced offers in this region for a short period of time and start enticing passengers. So putting AI Agents into this type of space to make predictions on how can we get a passenger into the funnel, or how can an airline get a passenger into the funnel, is an opportunity.

The other thing is the airlines are now expanding beyond the confines of their own jurisdiction, if you like. So it’s not just about my flight and my WiFi on board or my lounge access that I can offer this passenger. But what happens on the way to the airport? What if the weather is bad? What happens if we know that it’s going to take passenger longer in an Uber than it would normally would to get to the airport? How do we make a proactive recommendation or suggestion that actually you should plan to leave 30 minutes earlier because of what’s happening in real-time right now. And these aren’t new concepts in terms of passenger behaviour. When you’re travelling, you’re checking your watch and you’re thinking like, what do I need to prepare? What do I need to do? But it’s new behaviour in terms of the airline taking some onus and responsibility and helping you out with that, that’s where AI agents come into play.

They’re making these recommendations in advance of you even leaving your home, based on what is important to you. Is it spending time in the lounge? Is it getting through security as fast as possible? Is it having a nice view of the runway? Is it spending time in kind of a retail environment? Is it having offers at a coffee shop? And that then opens up this whole world of partnerships

These are all things that the airline now starts to sell beyond their fare

PA – What’s the passenger interface? How are you communicating these things with a passenger? Is that changing?

SC – A couple of important parts to that answer, the airline ultimately has to decide what is the method by which they are going to get in front of a of a passenger, which can change in different geographies and different markets in different cultures. To give you an interesting statistic, in Saudi Arabia, something in 90% of people book, travel, arrange travel, arrange everything around their travel on a mobile device. And so Riyadh Air is investing in a lot in the digital experience, and that digital enablement that allows them to get in front of a passenger.

Mobile apps are a good example of that. SMS is still valid. But the second part of this, in terms of interacting with a passenger, knowing the passenger is their shift to biometrics, and especially when you’ve got the passenger in the airport environment.

Riyadh Air is really very forward-thinking in terms of what will the airport of the future and the passenger experience of the future look like. They want this to be as frictionless as possible, so we obviously provide the technology and the enablement to make it as frictionless as possible, so there are no barriers there. They don’t want a passenger to have to get out a boarding pass. They don’t really want a passenger in an ideal world to have to get out a passport. Why? Why in this day and age do we still have passports? Why is that necessary? Our face is our passport, our biometrics, our currency.

PA – Have you had, are you having conversations with authorities about this? Because obviously, it wouldn’t be down to the airport or the airline.

SC – I think it’s a little bit preliminary, early stages at the moment. And so we’re not having those conversations, but we would go hand in hand with an airline and prove that this is possible, and that the technology is there and the enablement is there.

So I do believe at some point a new Saudi Arabia is a good example, because it’s a massively growing kind of hub and tourist opportunity. It’s going to be another great connecting hub in the Middle East.

They will build another airport at some point in the future, and so now is the time for airlines like Riyadh Air, to bake into that planning, in partnership with airport authorities. Because I strongly believe with airlines like Riyadh Air in the fold and in the decision-making process, we will not see an airport like we have today. When that new airport is built in Riyadh, it will be the airport of the future.

Because now is the opportunity to say the tech is here. We don’t need to do all these things that we’ve done the same way in the past. Some things. Yeah, security is security, but my mind races far ahead. So even at some point in the future, I think that will be very, very different. Technology will mean that your bag is being scanned as you’ve walked through the airport, not when you put it on a belt and then through a machine, but maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

See the way European airport security has changed over the last five years, that’s the direction of travel.

PA – In your view, how does Agentic AI system have applications after your flight? How does that fit into your thinking?

SC – If you travel today, if you traveled in the last few years, and your journey is disrupted, you will automatically have been getting notifications, maybe through the app or the airline that says, ‘Sorry, your journey has been disrupted. We were late. You missed or you’re going to miss your connecting flight, and we’ve booked you on a on an alternative’.

That as a concept is not new, but that’s achieved today through a very laborious rule framework of defining and hard coding. Well, if this happens, then this.

The difference where AI comes into play is more personalized recommendations. That AI agent knows that, okay, I’m going to miss my connection, but it’s still my preference to wait an extra 30 minutes and take airline A versus airline B or, I’m my personal travel preference is, no matter what airline I’m on, I would always prefer a window seat over an aisle seat.

And this is all stuff in my head that I know I like. But if it’s in my head, it’s available for an airline to go and collect from me. When you sign up with an airline frequent flyer program, or you log into an airline website, you can often store traveler preferences, for example. And so all of this is not taken into account today, but are the types of things that agentic AI can take into account.

So I think that’s one way that that it will make a difference, especially around disruption and things like this.

How are you capturing loyalty and bringing loyalty into the decision-making process through AI and data amalgamation through AI and agentic AI is another opportunity. If you think about every decision that the airline makes and the traveller makes somewhere along this journey, before you get to the airport, while you’re travelling, when you’re disrupted, after you get to your destination, when you’re at home, thinking about your next trip, these are all things that are ripe for kind of exploring and exploiting to make better to give more choice, to give more freedoms, to give more flexibility.

And I’m saying this like the airline has to do nothing now because the passenger has to do everything, because you’re putting it all in their hands. When I talk about flexibility and freedoms, part of that flexibility is the passenger choosing. Do they want to have the ability to decide those things for themselves and go in and action them themselves, or do they want AI or automation to go and do it for them? That is part of the freedom. I’ll tell you. For example, I have very I’m a frequent traveller. I have very strong preferences about where I connect and how I connect, and where I’m going to sit on a plane, and which airline I’m going to say on all of these things.

And yes, an AI agent can make a good prediction and automate this recommendation for me and the action to rebook me to do all of this, but as a passenger, I might just like the ability to go do that for myself, and that’s still important to a passenger, that’s the tech, that’s less about the AI piece and more about the technology and the enablement piece. As a passenger, give me the means to do whatever I need in your mobile app, or through whatever digital means you’re connecting with me, so that’s about flexibility, giving them, giving them the choice. Do they do it? Do they get automation to do it? Do they get an agent at the airline to do it? That choice is all about improving passenger experience?

PA – Where would you identify the risks of what you’ve just talked about?

SC – It’s AI and it’s a fast-moving space. It’s maturing, and so it’s not going to get it right 100% of the time. The risks are that every time, every now and then, when you don’t get it quite right, are you losing the trust and the confidence of the passenger? Are you mitigating that if it’s not quite the right recommendation, if it doesn’t do the quite the right thing, how quickly can it recover and regain confidence and trust from the traveller?

This is going to get better and stronger and more accurate over time. But the risk is that the travelling population need to also understand that it’s emerging and there’s going to be times when it doesn’t get it quite right, and it will get better and better over time. I think that’s probably one of the one of the key risks.

To me, it’s about incremental steps and proof. You can’t say, look, we’ve got AI agents that will make automated decisions. So let’s go and automate everything under the sun, and let’s go and let AI decide, be the decider for every decision that needs to needs to be made. That’s a bit of a scary kind of thought.

I’m sure the volume of automated decisions, recommendations, predictions in all spaces, travel and otherwise, will continue to increase, but getting it right and being careful about getting it right is taking small steps where you gain trust, you gain confidence, and you prove that it’s doing the right thing, and you are able to pivot fast if it’s not doing the right thing.