Interview with Dr. Kerem Kızıltunç, CIO Turkish Airlines

I think one big initiative we have this year is we are seriously considering spinning off our low-cost brand, AnadoluJet, into a fully owned subsidiary. It's mostly a brand today, so that means we will need a second airline IT infrastructure, if you will. So that's one of the big challenges going ahead. Apart from that, we have a quite ambitious timeline for our NDC rollout this year. I think that will be a game changer for us going forward because we fly to more than 120 different countries, so we have a huge sales network, and NDC will give us scale and differentiation opportunities from a business perspective. That's one of the big challenges, and we are embarking on the IATA's Offer and Order work, so we'll ramp up on that pretty much throughout this year.

We did a lot of work last year, especially on disruption management, especially around tax recovery. One of the things we want to do is complete that transformation, basically giving all the opportunities and options to our customers in normal operation and also in days of disruptions. Disruptions are becoming a norm, like snowstorms or strikes in different parts of our markets. To enable that, we want to revamp our digital infrastructure as well, because the way current things are built, they are mostly designed for regular day of operations. As we do that, we also want to benefit from cloud-native architectures, so there will be a lot of microservices work going on. We want to turn our mobile application into a super app. Payments is a big thing for us, so we are going to introduce our wallets this year, hopefully in Q2, which will give a lot of new options to our passengers. We have a full plate of projects going forward, but I think almost anything we do is all around digital transformation. We also have a lot of projects around operational excellence, both for disruption management and in other areas like paperless cargo operations. Employee experience is a huge thing for us; we are building a new employee experience mobile app. It's not even mobile first anymore, it's mobile only, so we're going to transform all the employee experience into a new mobile app.

I think the more functionalities we provide to our customers, the app is becoming like our own PSS system in a way. You have all the bells and whistles, from payments to business upgrades to offers to anything. The idea with super app is that customers can get our features and offers much more quickly. We want to be able to ship a lot more frequently from an architectural perspective, because today we have one huge monolithic mobile app and it takes two or three months every time we build a new release. With this new approach, we want to build micro apps within a shell application, and that will speed up introducing new features, promotions, and integrations a lot more quickly. So I guess with that we've come to agility, and you can be a bit more reactive to the market.

I think inspiration is still a huge thing. Especially when you want to do something like when your kids want to do a different kind of trip because they age and every two or three years they have a different interest. Why should I go? It's mostly a challenge to find the next best destination. I think there is a ton of opportunity there from a generative AI perspective, especially if you can provide personalized services to our passengers because they need to know the habits and the transformation. The platform that I'm most interested in is all the servicing aspects. Can generative AI help us with customer interactions, especially take a load off the call center? Maybe integrated with speech-to-text and text-to-speech, because that's where things are still a little bit fragile today. There's a huge amount of turnover with call center agents, a lot of new rules, and it's very difficult to communicate to all the call center agent workforce. Those are the areas that could be pretty interesting. But it's been like that for the last two decades probably, so there's a little bit of hype here. We'll need to see if, apart from text processing, can we really go beyond that and work with structured data, personalization, CRM systems, databases to integrate generative AI with our channels. That's where things will have to be tested.

Yeah, because currently it's mostly about text. There's a lot of textual information, and generative AI works pretty well on that. There are very good use cases, there are also some funny use cases. But when it comes to business, B2C or B2B, there's a lot of data, and making sense of that and trying to understand that might be a different level. We will have to see.

Well, as you know, in most travel use cases, airlines get a fraction of the overall travel wallet, share of purse. So we need to expand beyond air travel. That's what we've been trying to do over the last couple of years, adding hotels and car rentals. But they are not the whole main thing. We relaunched Turkish Airlines Holidays last year, which is air and hotels and package goods, and we want to expand on that going forward this year and next. There's a ton of new ancillary services popping up, and we need to turn our systems into a platform of selling travel, not only airline. That's a huge challenge from an organizational perspective because our customer services and revenue management are all about air travel. From a technology perspective, we just joined the IATA Airline Retailing Console, so we have committed to supporting full offers and order capability by 2030. I'm also a member of IATA's Digital Transformation Advisory Consortium, and we have committed as an airline to help the industry go through that transformation because not one airline can do it alone. There's a lot of interlining and standards that need to be redesigned to work with other industry partners. Can I sell a short-stay rental on my platform? I don't want to do a ton of integrations with Airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com. I want to have standard APIs to sell all those retailing options to my passengers. It's a huge amount of work, but I think it is time. Technology is there, there's a lot of data, airlines are ambitious, and the industry is very ambitious. IATA and many strong airlines are putting a lot of thought and muscle power into this, so I think we will get there this time. Perhaps it's the right time to take on this challenge.

Yeah, I think payments is one big area. It's kind of not at the center of the airline agenda maybe, but it's a huge convenience these new fintechs are providing. There are interesting integrations we are seeing being rolled out, and I think that will accelerate over the next few years, like buy now pay later and other payment options. We're also looking to roll out our own wallets, and we expect pretty cool things to come out of that. For the next three years, AI has a say, but as I said, that may need even more time to mature and cover all the business cases. Connectivity is huge. Even low-cost airlines and almost all full-service carriers are looking to roll out free internet or free messaging. I think in the next two to three years we will see a lot of that, and low-orbit satellites are going to speed that up pretty much. So I think that's a given. There are many other areas, but I think mobility is still a very hot topic. Mobile apps have been around for a while, but there are still pockets of areas within the operational portfolio where we are looking at building new mobile apps, and that's just going to continue.

I think this is my second time at this one. It's a good mix of coverage. I like it being available in multiple geographies so you can go and meet with different colleagues. It's a bit friendly atmosphere, I would say. It's not that huge and very formal, but it's not very boutique, so you can still get in contact with a good chunk of people and network and exchange ideas. So it's the right size.

Thank you, thank you very much.