The Silent Shift: Unveiling AI’s Takeoff in Aviation

By 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) emerged as strategic catalysts across the aviation industry. No longer confined to back-end efficiency, AI had redefined core areas such as operations, customer engagement, revenue management, safety, and sustainability. This background note explores how airlines have leveraged AI to gain a competitive advantage, and highlights the strategic decisions, organizational capabilities, and ecosystem shifts required to scale its impact in a highly-regulated, high-stakes industry.

This background note is intended to serve as a companion to cases on airlines, in particular the INSEAD case study “Sabena’s Final Descent” taught in the Introduction to General Management (IGM) course . It aims to describe the potential impact and key challenges of generative artificial intelligence for the airline industry.