5 Technological Trends of 2020 that’ll take Aviation Industry to New Heights

Flying to the new heights as innovators of strategic planning, airlines are the early adopters of many latest technologies. While some of them may augment security, others are targeted towards making the process easier for passengers. Let us discuss some of the technologies that will be gracing the airline industry in the year 2020.

Reduction in human effort with hyper-automation

While we’ve already seen the implementation of technology in the labour-intensive tasks with RPA (Robotics Process Automation), this year promises to bring about complete automation of the entire process. With a combination of multiple advanced technologies like AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning), the airline industry plans towards smoothening the process and making flying more secure and comfortable.

Hybrid cloud infrastructure to increase agility

Some of the leading airlines have been already been digitized with hybrid cloud IT infrastructure. Hybrid Cloud consists of public clouds, private clouds and on-premises resources for gaining competitive advantages with rapid and on-demand scalability and portability. Today, airlines know very-well that legacy infrastructure is a hindrance to digital innovation. This is especially true in the case of delivering high-performance internal enterprise systems, booking engines, and other customer-facing applications. With a hybrid cloud infrastructure strategy in mind, airlines are focusing to become more agile with scaling up or down the infrastructure to meet the new demands of the fast-moving digital world.

Cyber-Security

Cyber Security is one of the most pressing issues which the aviation industry is facing currently. With the fourth industrial revolution, there is a complete transformation in the way of doing business. The digital nature of the business makes it more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Customer sensitive data breach instances happened multiple times in recent years where airlines were a soft target for attackers. Cyber risks are increasing with trending technologies like IoT, AI, and Deep fakes. The emerging technologies come with a huge challenge to protect not only assets and customer data but also to ensure there’s minimal impact on critical functions. World Economic Forum’s initiative on Advancing Cyber Resilience in Aviation Industry (collaborated with ICAO) is one of many initiatives that have sprung up in the community. This initiative is focused on fostering collaboration across the aviation industry for cyber security.

Multi-Experience –Wearable, Chatbots and Voice Technology

Ms. Aarti Saxena(Associate Director – Innovations & Strategy), Xebia Technology

Interacting with customers is no more limited to the Airline’s Website and Mobile App. Virtual, Augmented and mixed reality, smart speakers, chatbots, voice technology, wearables - all are blending together to create a holistic experience for customers. MXDP (Multi-eXperience Development Platforms) are already gaining a lot of traction and offer a low-code framework that supports massive competitive advantage, and the airlines which adopt this technology will perform better than the ones that don’t.

Application Programming Interface (API)

To put it in simple terms an API is a messenger that takes requests, tells the system what you want to do and then returns the system’s response back to you. It’s the engine under the hood and helps different devices connect with each other.

Today, there is complete revamp and APIs are complete business product strategy package for airlines. Airlines have started leveraging the APIs to deliver the seamless customer experience for each touchpoint. In 2020, the aviation sector will see a further upsurge of APIs in combination with AI. Airlines may also use machine learning APIs for fraud detection, content personalization, document classification and call conversion prediction by combining big data, spatial/location, text, web, natural language data, and mobile data.