United Airlines' AI strategy: The airline that makes decisions fastest wins

The data piece was simple: the basic facts of the flight and the running chat between the attendants, pilots, gate agents, and the operations people associated with the flight. We fed that information — with additional data on weather, for example — into the AI model, to generate a good draft customer message.

The trick then was to have it understand the nuances of United Airlines’ communications style and what we wanted to emphasize. That’s where prompt engineering came in, not to train the model to understand flight data, but to use the words United prefers. Let’s take safety, for instance. We can emphasize safety with without scaring people, and the AI tool is learning to make the right word choice.

We were excited to discover that in addition to learning how to craft the message, the AI model was very good at looking back in time to bring previous flight data into the current situation. Even our human storytellers didn’t include reasons for flight delays, and that kind of information can be very useful to a customer.