Each time a jet card customer requests a trip, it is now cross-referenced with thousands of empty legs from hundreds of operators to find simulated alternatives. The new trip may then be offered to the customer for a substantially lower cost than their fixed hourly jet card rate.

Founder and executive chair Mike Winston said: “Jet Card customers can now take advantage of AI to score a Reroute and save money. Empty legs rarely align with customer needs but reroutes often do. A reroute is a slight tweak to the flight plan of an empty leg that is booked at a price in between an empty leg and a new charter. 

“Our Reroute AI software firstly identifies opportunities, secondly suggests a price to the operator, and lastly allows for a smooth rerouted booking.”

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This was the consideration Web Manuals founder and CEO Martin Lidgard found himself pondering when thinking about deploying artificial intelligence (AI). He initially decided to bin the idea, but now just over 18 months later Web Manuals has launched Amelia, an AI-enhanced search tool, that is pioneering the use of AI for pilots’ manuals.

Amelia allows users to pose questions and receive descriptive answers from within their manuals, helping them make “safe and well-informed” decisions while avoiding “costly” diversions and delays. The document search tool just got its first customer too — Vienna-based aircraft management and charter company, Skyside— with more on the way imminently.

“When we first saw ChatGPT coming out my gut reaction was: ‘I don’t know if this is relevant for us’. Manuals are safety critical components and I wouldn’t necessarily trust an AI tool to write them for you,” Lidgard tells CJI. “Then at the last EBACE a few colleagues opened my eyes to the fact there are other things than writing manuals where the use of AI could be of great benefit.”

Upon this realisation, Web Manuals accelerated efforts to adopt AI with the acquisition of Swedish firm, ManualAI. The Gothenburg-based company specialises in AI-based search technology which gave Web Manuals a platform and an understanding of how to structure developments moving forward.

“The acquisition gave us a lot of great technology and know-how, but it wasn’t tailored to how we wanted to use it. It also didn’t take into consideration the scale of our operations — we have more than 650 customers and 70,000 users — so we had to refine it quite a lot to make it work for us. The AI functionality is a critical component, but that is only the core.”

Amelia’s first feature is the search functionality that gives users “a more intelligent” way of searching versus inputting a keyword. Traditional search results are displayed in a list format rather like Google. Amelia instead provides summaries of each result relative to the question asked by the user. It is then possible to have a conversation with Amelia to refine the results.

“This first feature is an exploration of how AI can improve accessibility of information for pilots, up front staff, cabin crew, ground staff and so on. And also how it can facilitate working with clients’ large and consistently changing regulations and volumes of manuals thousands of pages long all tied together in an intricate way.”

In Web Manual’s roadmap there are several additional features that will be added to the Amelia suite, Lidgard revealed.

The system is incrementally more expensive than using Web Manuals without Amelia — €3 entry level cost without and €4 with the AI functionality. Lidgard hopes that low entry costs and added functionality will drive uptake to Web Manuals’ 70,000-strong user base.

As the first customer to integrate Amelia into its operations, Skyside’s EFB-Admin Jonas Conrad said he expects a “significant enhancement” in the firm’s ability to access information quickly. Skyside has been a Web Manuals customer since 2020.

“By leveraging Amelia’s innovative AI capabilities, we expect to reduce our workload and streamline document management processes. This will not only boost our efficiency but also allow us to focus more on critical tasks, ensuring safety remains our top priority. Web Manuals Amelia AI is set to revolutionise our operations, enabling us to perform our duties more effectively and stay ahead with new technological advancements,” explained Conrad.

Web Manuals has a total of 338 business aviation customers worldwide, comprised of charter operators, helicopter operators, corporate jets, mission and medical operators, and FBOs. It has 182 business aviation customers across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. This represents more than half (52%) of the company’s total business aviation customer base and 28% of the global community (648).

The company has also just been recognised as a Master Gazelle (Mästargasell) at the Di Gazelle 2024 Awards, which honours fast-growing Swedish businesses. The award follows six years of being named a Gazelle. Launched in 2000 by Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri and only achieved by 1% of all Swedish companies, the Gazelle award – which Web Manuals has now won six times – recognises businesses that have doubled their revenue through organic and profitable growth in the past three years.

“In actual fact our growth rate has probably been closer to tripling our revenue in that same period of time,” says Lidgard. “So we’ve averaged about 42% year-over-year growth for the past 12 years. We started off small with a couple hundred thousand euros in revenue and just five people. Now we have taken on over 65 customers this year alone which is about three per week.”

The post How Web Manuals is using AI to make operations safe appeared first on Corporate Jet Investor.

AI and how it can streamline otherwise menial tasks is making headlines, but machine learning software has been a focus for MySky since it was founded in 2015. Co-founder and global strategy director of the global technology platform, Marich, told Corporate Jet Investor that AI plays a key role in how MySky’s products and services support business aviation users.

“I think right now everyone seems a little scared of AI and what is happening, but we see it more as a friend to our operators, who should use this technology as an assistant and not as a replacement for your workforce,” said Marich.

“What we identified is that there are a lot of very time-consuming processes in our industry, which require of man hours. These include invoice verification, invoice allocation, breakdown, quoting charter trips with a very low conversion rate — all these are labor-intensive tasks which can easily be performed by a machine. Charter operators have a very thin margin which they try to optimise so they don’t have an exponentially expandable headcount, which leads to a limited human capacity which has to be allocated to various tasks. MySky removes the time consuming, non-added value tasks and automates them,” he added.

This enables human capital to be more pro-active in other areas of the business, such as selling and managing owner relationships, increasing overall profitability along the way.

Jean de Looz, head of Americas, MySky agreed. He said when it comes to tasks that are repetitive in nature, humans are generally not very good at observing for long periods of time. “These types of processes happen all throughout business aviation. When I sold charter there was a saying ‘You’d run the carpet ragged trying to go to a director for approval on a price’. There was a train of people always going to and from the VP of sales. AI can help to remove that.”

MySky views AI the same way as the US military, as a force multiplier, allowing you to do far more work more efficiently in a shorter period of time. But is there a ceiling on how far AI can go to streamline tasks? Marich refers to the various iterations of chatbot Chat GPT (now on version 4 at the time of publication). “It is really hard to gauge what is going to be available in two weeks or two years,” he said. But in terms of business aviation there are a set amount of routine tasks that are linked to the amount of hours the aircraft flies. So there is a margin of progression based on how much more efficient each of those tasks becomes, said Marich.

The MySky team spends a considerable amount of time trying to understand what those processes are, what the bottlenecks in a business could be. “It is as much about the engine as it is about the logic you use in working out where to drive that engine to,” said Marich.

Jean de Looz added: “There are a lot of jobs that are unidimensional in the business. AI can actually make them multidimensional and therefore far more attractive to do. It’s like going from 2D to 3D, if your job consists of line coding and maintenance invoices and you have no idea what you’re doing, now you have contextual intelligence around your tasks because of the AI.” 

“Keep in mind, business continuity is a big risk for many businesses. People leave and it is a big cost for them. Having a system that uses AI can help reduce that, which is advantageous for both parties — for folks looking for work and also for the organisations that want to keep talent,” said de Looz.

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