How AerCap’s CIO has been a catalyst for a robust M&A strategy

Accelerating decision making with analytics and AI

With CEO Aengus Kelly talking publicly about AerCap being a data company, a big part of Koletzki’s forward planning is around data analytics, finding a way to harvest knowledge hidden in databases that can benefit the business. Last year he was planning to build a data warehouse in Azure when Microsoft Fabric was announced.

Ordinarily, Koletzki would be wary of ‘buggy’ new products, but because Fabric reuses existing Microsoft components and makes data analytics available as a service, he was comfortable signing up and becoming the first Fabric customer in Ireland. “Microsoft is very clever in connecting their products together. It meant I didn’t have to build my own architecture,” he says. “I just subscribed to their service.”

While there are AI components in Fabric, the wider use of AI by AerCap is still under evaluation. Koletzki has strong views on the hottest topic in tech. “Let’s be very clear, AI has to be controlled,” he says. “Generative AI is a probabilistic, not a deterministic system. For the last 40 years, we’ve been interacting with computers as human beings and been trained into believing that a deterministic answer will be repeated when you ask the same question twice. That’s not the case in AI. It’s a probabilistic system, and it can hallucinate.”