Delta Air Lines was likely to make an ideal co-investment partner due to the array of distribution opportunities arising from its international alliance partners, said Vikram Rajagopalan, head of innovation strategy at the corporate.
Delta’s participation in the SkyTeam global alliance meant portfolio technologies could roll-out to affiliates worldwide once the firm was satisfied the use-case had been proven.
“From a global reach perspective if you start with Delta there may be the opportunity to put the product in front of a global audience at scale,” Rajagopalan told Steve Gotz, partner at corporate innovation advisory platform Silicon Foundry, during an interview on stage.
Highlights in the air carrier’s portfolio included Misapplied Sciences, developers of a so-called “parallel reality” display capable of showing personalised content to multiple users simultaenously, all translated into their native language.
Parrallel Reality would be piloted with 100 or so airside passengers flying with Delta from Detroit Metropolitan Airport later this year, he said.
The technology was representative of an industry drive to improve the end-to-end passenger experience, Rajagopalan suggested, taking in everything from departures to “seamless” security clearance and reconciliation with baggage.
Early initiatives in this regard included Delta’s award miles partnership with ridehailing platform Lyft, and bringing machine learning technology to its Atlanta dispatch centre to optimise allocation of aircraft.
“Some of that is not purely not on the customer side. A lot of the owners that enable the travel journey are pre-operational as well. There is a lot of orchestration required for entire sequences, for instance moving bags or rejecting an aircraft.”
Rajagopalan said startups would require an “intricate” understanding of airline operations, something they often lacked by comparison to segments like car manufacturing.
Delta Air Lines had adopted an early-stage focus in part for this reason, he added, to provide that working understanding before building out the business.