Food
AirAsia reaches out for fresh ideas on digital transformation. A program called Aviato, which uses machine learning to profile user interests, won first prize at AirAsia’s inaugural Airvolution 2017 hackathon.
The Singaporean team, which goes by the same name, won the grand prize of RM25,000, 100,000 AirAsia Big points and five return flights to any of the airline’s destinations.
“Aviato is able to profile a user’s interests and extract keywords based on the images posted on an Instagram account,” says team leader Durwin Ho Hsu Tian, 27.
The rest of the team – made up of Choo Yan Sheng, 28, John Goh Choo Ern, 27, and Kevin Kwa Leung Boon, 33 – said they didn’t come up for the idea for Aviato till late night on the first day.
“Back home, we had already prepared around 30 to 50 ideas based on the three challenges given by AirAsia a couple of months before the hackathon,” said Ho.
“We roughly knew what we wanted to do and once we had nailed down the idea, everything just fell into place.”
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Ho says AirAsia has a huge chunk of raw data which Aviato can process so that the company can know its customers better so that it can offer targeted promos.
For instance, Aviato is able to profile whether a person loves the outdoors by running an image recognition algorithm on his or her Instagram account. If a person likes photos related to mountains and forests, the program could, for instance, made to push a notification offering flight promotions to Kota Kinabalu.
Given more time, Aviato will be able to pull data from other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, he says.
Digital transformation
The hackathon was part of the company’s ongoing efforts to turn AirAsia into a digital airline this year, says AirAsia group CEO Tan Sri Tony Fernandes.
However, this is not something new as technology and digital innovations have always been at the core of the airline since its early days, he says.
“Our roots are digital. We started with the Internet and we are now a very social media based airline,” he says.
Asked on how “digital” the company is right now, Fernandes puts it around 20-30%, adding that there is a huge potential for further digitisation moving forward.
“It sounds like we are not so digital but others are way behind,” says Fernandes.
Today, he’s more focused on getting the staff to think digital. “I can take someone to drink water but I can’t force him to drink,” he says.
However, he is confident that the company will be able to push the level of digitalisation to around 70% by the end of 2018.
The digitalisation process will see the company focus on three key areas, namely commercial, customer experience and operations.
On the commercial front, the company is looking to offer personalised and targeted promotions by taking advantage of its large amount of data.
To improve customer experience it is looking to phase out check-in desks by using biometric tech such as fingerprint and facial recognition but this is dependent on getting approval from regulatory bodies.
“On the operations side, we want to digitalise all the engineering, pilot flight and even human resource data to improve efficiency,” he says. This will help the airline to cut costs, say, by improving fuel efficiency.
On why the company decided to host a hackathon for the first time ever, Fernandes says, “I think we are not moving fast enough. We can’t do everything in-house.”
“There is no way we can do it all alone. We want to get ideas from people who fly with us and know us to help us build this new digital airline and what better way to start it off than with a hackathon.
“We believe the digital revolution will take AirAsia to another level in terms of making it easier to fly, easier to sell and giving our customers the products they really want.”
