Cathay Pacific: Transforming Airline Operations with AI

Cathay Pacific worked with BCG and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to transform its Integrated Operations Centre, a transformation that redefines how the airline manages disruption on a daily basis and makes data-driven decisions. This advancement is transforming its ways of working, boosting the company’s efficiency, and saving millions of dollars in disruption costs as well as improving punctuality and customer satisfaction.

The approach is driven by two cutting-edge, advanced AI solutions developed by the BCG and KLM partnership: Pathfinder is a solution that optimizes tail allocation by leveraging a machine learning-based delay prediction model and placing buffers where they are most useful and important, while Sentry steps in on the day of operations to dynamically resolve operational issues in real time. Both solutions are guided by the Operations Decision Model (ODM), the underlying logic layer, which considers all hard and soft costs and evaluates the total cost of all possible operational decisions in real time. ODM brings together all considerations, from customer connections and cargo sensitivity to crew logistics and environmental impact, transforming previously siloed data into a single source of truth.

This transformation represents one of the most complex projects in Cathay’s history, requiring extensive infrastructure upgrades, deep cross-functional collaboration, and a shared commitment across more than 15 teams and 60 subject matter experts. It reflects the strength of a collaborative approach, combining Cathay’s operational ambition with proven tools and deep expertise from the BCG and KLM partnership to unlock the full potential of digital innovation, data, and AI.