September 6, 2024
by
Jonathan Andrews
A new association targeting the challenges and opportunities that artificial intelligence (AI) can provide to airports has held its first official meeting with airports and industry.
With the Cities Today Institute acting as the Secretariat, the Airports AI Alliance is formed of eight founder member airports, including Dallas Fort Worth, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, Denver International and Toronto Pearson International. Joining them are industry members Zensors AI, NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“It’s going to be a very output-driven and practical group,” said Oliver Hendry, Programme Director at the Airports AI Alliance. “This is about how AI can assist airports in reaching their business objectives whether that be around operations, passenger experience, or safety and security.”
The discussion at the session on 19th August covered the governance structure of the alliance, made up of an Executive Committee (four airports and four industry members) and a Secretariat (the Cities Today Institute).
“Airport driven but industry inspired”, the alliance will have three working groups that cover strategy, technology, and operations and will work towards developing use cases – on biometrics, generative AI, forecasting, predictive maintenance, and autonomous equipment–key performance indicators, an adoption roadmap and member reports.
Additional airport stakeholders such as chief financial officers joined the first session alongside chief innovation and technology officers.
“I’m really excited to be a part of this Alliance,” said Chris Crist, Chief Information Officer, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. “We have a lot of opportunities to transform the passenger experience, and although we’ve all been digging in a bit to AI in some areas, through this Alliance we can talk with each other about the challenges that we’re facing as we implement solutions.”
C-suites will discuss change management and organisational ownership at an upcoming virtual session to be held in October before the first formal in-person session of the Alliance. This will take place during the Airport Leadership Forum on October 15-16 in Los Angeles.
According to Alex Covarrubias, Chief Growth Officer at Zensors, the Alliance has been formed to address critical subjects such as data governance, integration with legacy systems, standardisation, regulatory compliance and use case evaluation.
“Foundation AI models tailored for airports offer a substantial opportunity to enhance operational efficiency and financial performance,” Covarrubias said. “The Alliance is dedicated to standardising the AI adoption process across all areas of airport operations, prioritising use cases, and accelerating time-to-value while meeting the critical demands of airport environments.”
The next session of the Alliance will focus on data management and will take place on September 17th.
