KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is the world's oldest international airline still operating under its original name. On its 100th anniversary, FTE spoke to Daan Debie, Director Engineering & Architecture, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, who outlined how the airline has embraced innovation through its "pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit". Indeed, KLM's vigorous digital transformation strategy is largely due to recognising and leveraging the advantages of modern technology. Debie, who will speak in the Premium Conference at FTE-APEX Asia EXPO 2019 (12-13 November, Singapore), explains: "Digital transformation does not just mean replacing paper with apps. For us it means getting the right information to the right people at the right time to enable well-informed decision-making in an increasingly complex environment, supported by digital tooling. "Key to this is to be truly data-driven, working from a single-source-of-truth and applying cutting-edge technology and algorithms to make sense of the complex operations." KLM is currently investing heavily in building automated decision-making tools to improve operations. In June last year, the airline embarked on a unique partnership with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) which has the potential to "revolutionise global airline operations". The project is a result of a close collaboration between KLM Operations Decision Support and Operations frontline teams, BCG's consulting team, and members of BCG Gamma, an artificial intelligence and advanced analytics entity of data scientists, data engineers and software developers, who have developed a solution based on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced optimisation that addresses all elements of the airline operations, while having a positive impact on customer experience and operating costs. With these tools, KLM and other airlines will be able to tackle the most complex decisions pertaining to fleet, crew, ground services and network, with a focus on breaking down the typical silos across these departments. Earlier this year, Brazilian low-cost carrier GOL became the first airline customer of the KLM-BCG joint venture which will help GOL deliver better on-time performance to its customers while maintaining low costs. As Director Engineering & Architecture for the Department of Operations Decision Support (ODS) at KLM, Debie is responsible for creating and maintaining a cohesive overall architecture and technological vision for the products and platforms developed at ODS, but also for other clients within the partnership between KLM and BCG. "I help teams within ODS and BCG/KLM teams at Partnership clients to build their products in accordance with the architectural vision," he explains. "Additionally, I'm responsible for ensuring that we maintain high engineering standards in our development efforts.

In Part 1 of this series, I profiled how two companies -- Domino's Pizza and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines -- are using chatbots to boost their brands and smoothe interactions with their customers. This time, we'll continue by looking at cosmetics retailer Sephora and sharing some of the lessons marketers can learn from these leaders' experiments. Company description: The French cosmetics company offers makeup, fragrance, skin care and hair care goods for men and women featuring more than 300 brands and its own label. It has approximately 2,300 stores in 33 countries. Its parent company, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, reports revenues of 4 billion euros in the first nine months of 2017 in the Perfumes & Cosmetics business group, which Sephora is a part of.

The use of artificial intelligence is become more and more present in our daily lives, often in cases where we aren't even aware of it. In one recent adaptation, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is implementing AI, and TravelPulse spoke with Mikhail Naumov, President of DigitalGenius, creator of KLM's AI system. Mikhail Naumov: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines uses bots for delivering of boarding passes, gate change notifications, etc. These are separate, and not built by DigitalGenius. These are keyword- or action-based automations that make it easier for customers to get valuable information pushed to their phone in time of need.

With the increasing volume of interactions with customers over social media channels, KLM Royal Dutch Airline is the first airline to test how artificial intelligence could assist customer service agents. "We have 100,000 mentions a week on social media," says Tjalling Smit, senior vice president of Digital at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. "We handle around 15,000 customer service cases a week and we answer our customers 24/7 in 10 different languages." As social channels proliferate, KLM makes sure it is present where its customers live online. "We were the first airline to allow customers to get their boarding passes and flight confirmation through Facebook Messenger," says Smit. KLM is piloting DigitalGenius' GPU-accelerated AI system that is integrated directly into KLM's Customer Relationship Management tool, and provides a layer of deep learning and artificial intelligence to service agents in real-time.