Flying high with AI: Alaska Airlines uses artificial intelligence to save time, fuel and money

Given the near 85% fail rate in corporate artificial intelligence projects, it was a pleasure to visit with Alaska Airlines, which launched a highly successful AI system that is helping flight dispatchers. I visited with Alaska to see what the "secret sauce" was that made its AI project a success. Here are some tips to help your company execute AI as well as Alaska Airlines has. Initially, the idea of overhauling flight operations control existed in concept only. "Since the idea was highly conceptual, we didn't want to oversell it to management," said Pasha Saleh, flight operations strategy and innovation director for Alaska Airlines. "Instead, we got Airspace Intelligence, our AI vendor, to visit our network centers so they could observe the problems and build that into their development process.