Mapping the progress of Air New Zealand’s digital rebuild

“We think this is just the start of many new propulsion aircraft that start to show up over the next decade and beyond,” he says. “This is a chance to start practicing what an airline of the future could look like. So a lot of our digital agenda overlaps with our sustainability agenda.”

As such, there are a lot of use cases across the airline where emerging digital tools can play big roles, but the general approach is cautious curiosity. “We’ve got a bunch of work underway to build the workbench for advanced AI techniques, so this capability underpins everything we do,” he says. “We’re starting to think of Air New Zealand as a Petri dish for innovation where we can solve some long-standing challenges in the airline industry. And if we can solve those problems here, and productize them right, then we think we can take it around the world and others will be interested.”

CIO APAC editor Cathy O’Sullivan recently spoke with Ravishankar about how Air New Zealand has changed its operating model to uplift digital capability across the organization, and how technology plays a huge role in its sustainability goals. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On establishing a tech foundation: I had an interest in computers from a very young age. I had a chance to study programming at school in India, and my mom encouraged me to take up programming. My first job was tutoring in a university programming department, and then I stayed as a research assistant. While I did that in the late 90s, two colleagues and I decided to set up a startup. We were very excited about it, because we grew up with the internet and we could see the possibilities. We understood Moore’s Law to an extent, and thought people will watch TV on their mobile phones. So we set out to build a mobile TV app business, on 2g networks before the iPhone. We tried to raise money but people thought we were crazy. But we persisted. And Spark, or Telecom New Zealand at the time, were looking for a hero app on the new WCDMA network. And that’s what really what got me introduced to large enterprise. Unfortunately, the startup didn’t go anywhere, but we learned a lot.

On air travel reliance: Air New Zealand is the national flag carrier and it’s something everyone who works at the airline realizes and takes seriously. We’re very proud of that, but we also carry the burden of that responsibility. It’s a gateway into the country, and for anyone wondering why it’s so important for an airline brand in the country, some of it is the tyranny of distance. We’re far away from everywhere else, and the only way in and out is by flight, so the airline is important from a wider New Zealand perspective. About 16% of New Zealand’s GDP relies on air travel, whereas in the US, it’s about 4%. Even in city hubs like Dubai and Singapore, it’s around 12%. So we’re very reliant on connectivity, both internationally and domestically. Sometimes people don’t realize New Zealand is a big country and we only have 5 million people, so you never have the business case for high-speed rail or massive road networks. So in some cases, we’re the lifeline service across the country.

On the organization’s mission: Our purpose is to connect New Zealanders to each other, and New Zealand to the world. So everyone, including those in my team, come to work every day to fulfil that mission. Implicit to that, we have this working ambition to become the world’s leading digital airline, so a lot of my team’s focus is on bringing that to life. The way we’ve looked to attack that is by saying if we want to become that, then we need to stop thinking of ourselves as an airline with a fantastic digital department, and as a digital business that happens to be an airline. So the concept of my team now has been redefined in the way we look at digital. Almost 95% of my team don’t necessarily work directly for me anymore. Eighteen months ago, we decided to rewire the airline, where digital gets fully embedded into everything. So the concept of my team is an interesting operating model.