CEO of Airbus. Thank you so much for joining us. Lots to talk about, so let's go straight into it. Um, you have used AI for a while at Airbus, but things have changed recently and accelerator. So, just draw the landscape for us on how you're using it and then we'll dive in.
Yeah, good morning everyone. Happy to be here and speak about AI. Indeed at Airbus, we've been using AI for decades. The traditional AI, machine learning, deep learning in different fields that was more for experts, quite sophisticated. And things have changed tremendously in the past years with the arrival of GenAI, democratizing AI. And we've trained a lot of people, between 70,000 to 80,000 people trained on AI. We want to embrace AI, to use AI as much as we can. GenAI has an incredible potential. We've started with a number of rather small projects, proof of concept, pilot projects, and we came to the conclusion that those hundreds of projects – I think we have something like 600 projects that were launched – were not very efficient. That was probably a necessary pain, helping AI to be endorsed, to be understood better, to reduce the level of fear with AI. But it was not very efficient. So we've reduced to roughly 20 projects that can significantly change the efficiency of what we're doing, and we're focusing on those projects. So that's the application of GenAI in the company. And we see coming agentic AI with a huge potential, but we're not yet there, and we're just starting to understand how we will make use of agentic AI.
Right, so let's try to dive in. Let's look at your commercial planes. You have a 10-year backlog. Your challenge is not finding customers, it's getting your planes out fast enough and with all the quality checks. So how is AI helping you in that manufacturing process? How is it accelerating things?
Yeah. So at Airbus we are mostly using AI in three fields: development, engineering, production, and services. Production is indeed one of our main challenges at the moment. AI is used already in automation – I mean you use robots that are powered by AI. We are using AI for quality checks. We are using AI for efficiency of the processes, and that's being either in place or deployed. But the large development and deployment of AI for manufacturing will be on the next generation of planes. So we're currently working on identifying the best way to use AI within robotics and automation, and within engineering simulation, to do better planes and produce them in a much faster, efficient way, and with an even higher degree of quality first time. So that's the kind of application we're having in AI. And in services we have plenty of applications. One that is quite amazing is the so-called predictive maintenance, where based on the huge volume of data that we have on board airplanes, we can use AI on patterns of failure. So you can identify before it happens what is going to happen in terms of deficiencies in failure, and you can prevent failure rather than fix failures afterwards.
And how about in flight operations? Of course, computers play a huge role already on planes. We have autonomous cars. We have a lot of autonomous things. Are we going to have an autonomous plane one day or maybe just one pilot? Is AI leading us that way?
So, we already have drones and autonomous flights or planes mostly in defense. The use of AI in defense doesn't respond to the same expectations than what we do for commercial applications. In commercial airplanes, we're today using AI in non-safety critical functions, even to enhance safety, but not for the core safety systems. Because AI today is not considered predictable enough. So we can put AI in the onboard systems. That's probably for later. But we're using AI around. So all what we do on the ground: engineering, production, quality, support and services. But when it comes to putting AI in the planes, we do it a lot in military planes. For instance, we do automatic refueling based on AI. That's much more efficient than based on manual steering. But we're not at the point where the autopilot, the fly-by-wire of a commercial airplane would be powered by AI. This is for later. In the application of AI onboard commercial airplane, what we do is enhance safety. So on top of what we have today, for instance in automatic landing systems, we are using AI on image recognition to increase the level of safety, to be able to identify, to detect objects on the ground that the pilot would not identify alone. So this is the kind of development we see arriving in aviation. We take by far more risks when it comes to defense space when there's no human being being involved, but when we are carrying passengers, then we take less risks and it takes more time to deploy the AI systems.
Because you mentioned defense, I want to dive in on that. We know the revolution that drones for example are bringing to that sector. Can you just give us more content or more color on how AI is transforming the defense industry?
AI, I mean AI is plenty of different things. So that's the first remark. The second one is it gives the potential to assist humans for tasks where complexity is involved. And actually when you look at the development of the battlefield today, it is a digital battlefield. Therefore, the amount of data that has to be managed is no longer compatible with what a human being can do. So, we're deploying AI in military systems to digest a huge volume of data and bring consolidated information or help for decision to human beings. But we keep human beings at the center when it comes to decision making. That's really what we see happening in defense.
Because there's a key ethical question around this evolution. So, how do you bring this in your thinking, like to the framework or the development of that industry?
Well, when it comes to defense, that very much boils down to the concept of utilization that the armed forces will want for the systems they're using. And there's a fast development. There are different philosophies, but basically what we see happening is really keeping the human being at the center when it comes to making strategic decisions of striking or not striking, of acting or not acting. And therefore AI is here to simplify complexity and bring to the human beings information or decisions they can swallow, they can manage. When it comes to commercial, that's very different. In the commercial arena, we use AI to be able to develop better planes, to be able to produce faster, cheaper, and with a higher degree of quality, and as I said earlier, to support aircraft in service by increasing the level of operational readiness by preventive maintenance, by avoiding failures. That's basically the way we look at it.
