AI already enables airlines to make pricing decisions with minimal latency and optimize cabins

The Chief Information Officer of Plus Ultra Líneas Aéreas, Zaki Aroutin, participated in the Bolder Summit 2025 forum, where he argued that “every decision made by the Systems Department must be aimed at supporting operational safety, regulatory compliance, and a simpler passenger experience.”

The CIO of Spain’s third long-haul airline explained that his department’s starting point when incorporating technology is to “prioritize basic elements such as automating repetitive tasks that add little value, and ensuring that systems operate at the speed the business demands.”

One of the topics he addressed in his presentation was the impact of AI. For Aroutin, artificial intelligence “is already part of our day-to-day activity. It begins with simple and useful tasks like summarizing emails and minutes, reviewing documents, and generating support content. From there, it scales up to automating recurring operations through agents that execute workflows from start to finish, without fatigue or errors. This allows the team to dedicate its time to resolving higher-value cases. The logic is pragmatic: use AI where it saves time, reduces errors, and speeds up response times,” he added.

The executive pointed to a clear example where technology plays a key role: “In Spain, an electronic ticket is equivalent to an invoice; however, for tax purposes, many customers require an official invoice. We were receiving more and more requests by postal mail, and since they were processed manually in the ERP system, the process became unsustainable. Therefore, we decided to automate it to comply with tax regulations and increase efficiency.”

The next major AI advancement the airline is working on focuses on customer relations and revenue. According to the Plus Ultra Systems Director, “LLM-based chatbots enable true self-service, and more sophisticated models help forecast demand, improving load factors and reducing no-shows. In terms of pricing, AI speeds up the monitoring of competitor fares, enabling timely responses and decision-making to increase margins and customer engagement.”

Looking ahead, Zaki Aroutin envisions operations in which AI and the integration of self-service channels with the underlying internal systems “enable true self-service: pricing decisions with minimal latency and better-optimized cabins. It’s not about adding tools, but orchestrating them so that responses to customers and the market occur practically in real time, measured in terms of load factor, no-shows, and margin.”

With more than twenty years of professional experience, Zaki Aroutin, a systems engineer, has served as CIO of Plus Ultra Líneas Aéreas since 2019.