Our AI conversations have been happening for the past two years. There are commercial and operational parts of our business that are working on proof of concepts—that includes working with big companies as well as startups that have specific expertise in testing AI to either improve business performance or create a virtual assistant, like Juliet. Our investigation into chatbots started 18 months ago, and the official development work started in late 2017.

We looked at some of the work airlines in Europe and Asia have been doing. We felt that we were in the infancy stage of this very long game of AI chatbots in our industry. We saw projects with different levels of sophistication, and airlines with different purposes for their chatbot. Implementations can be very different, too, whether it's presented as an app icon or a version of their logo. And some airlines use a human name, like what we did with Juliet, or a branded name.