United Airlines sets its flight plan for gen AI success

The flight-status service, released earlier this year, gives customers faster, more transparent and context-rich information about flight delays and updates, the CIO says. United has used the storytelling LLM to send out more than 100,000 digital notifications to date and has identified roughly 90 other use cases in the pipeline, Birnbaum adds.

As part of its storytelling ethos, the flight-status LLM will specify, for example, which precise weather event may be affecting a delayed flight and provide quick and useful information to customers about next actions. This has proved to be far better than broadly announcing that a plane is delayed due to mechanical issues or bad weather when it is sunny outside, Birnbaum says. 

“We worked hard to fine-tune this model to take operational feeds, notes from our operations teams, the crew, and all these different sources of data, and have AI take all this data and create a narrative that is more transparent, empathetic, decisive, and clear as we can be,” the CIO says. “As opposed to a canned message, we try to write a specific story about what’s going on with your flight. People hear the specifics, and they understand it and their blood pressure goes down. Our storytellers still look at the messages to make sure they’re within the realm of what we want to communicate but we’re getting much more comfortable with it.’