December 10, 2019 • 31 mins
Today, running an airline is as much about technology as it is about aviation, with connectivity at the heart of it all. Hyper-connected passengers who expect their bandwidth to be as fast as their planes, and their flights as entertaining as their homes, are changing the airline industry. 5G is poised to provide the mobility needed to meet and exceed expectations, fueling new experiences and efficiencies one could only imagine a few years ago. In this episode of The Restless Ones, our host Jonathan Strickland speaks with Ravi Simhambhatla, Chief Technology Officer of United Airlines, to discuss what it takes to build a connected airline in a 5G world. Make sure to check out other episodes in this series featuring: Nicole Raimundo, Chief Information Officer of Cary, North Carolina and Firdaus Bhathena, Chief Digital Officer of CVS Health.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to The Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I've spent
the last twelve years covering technology and learning how it works,
demystifying everything from massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and
everything in between. As we stand at the beginning of
a new era of unprecedented connectivity with the rollout of
(00:23):
five G technology, I'm partnering with T Mobile for Business
to sit down with some of the visionary leaders in
technology across all industries to get a better understanding of
how tech and connectivity will change business forever. These leaders
are the pioneers who don't follow trends. They define them.
(00:43):
This show is their story. They are the Restless Ones.
I'm excited for five G to come on mainstream, and
I'll tell you why. It's because our world is becoming
(01:04):
a collection of sensors. Um you know, whether we subscribe
to the monotics in material over time, we're gonna be
surrounded by censors and will be also part of that
sensor community. For the first episode in this series, we
couldn't have picked a better guest than Robbie sim Humbatla,
chief technology officer at United Airlines. Robbie has a long
(01:27):
background in technology and leading teams to come up with
innovative solutions to truly challenging problems. He was employee fifty
three with Virgin Airlines, where he helped create a new
airline that could offer services that more entrenched companies couldn't
at the time. He served for three years as CTO
for air LINGUS before joining United Airlines, where he continues
(01:48):
to chart a course that takes advantage of the latest
technologies in ways that impact all areas of the business,
from back end operations to customer experiences. I started by
a king Robbie if there were any particular technological solutions
he could point to as an example of how his
vision and leadership came into play in overcoming a challenge.
(02:09):
Here's what he had to say. My vision is only
as good as the team that works with me. UM,
So I think in one of the biggest problems for
an airline, so I'll talk about my immediate context is
something called revenue management. And in a nutshell, it is
a science of when should we fill up our planes
(02:30):
with people at what price points? UM, And one of
the big challenges we had about three years ago was
that our existing revenue management system was producing a questionable forecast,
which was forcing our teammates to actually really smart women
and men instead of working on optimizing the forecast the
(02:51):
work and correcting the forecast UM. And if you do that,
you spend a lot of you know, a lot of
your energy and calories and doing things that don't really
add you UM. So the last three years, my team,
along with our revenue management experts, we built a brand
new system called Gemini UM which does what we call
conditional demand forecasting. It has reduced our incidents of errors
(03:15):
against forecasts of bias uh dramatically enough that over the
last two years it has added over six eighty million
dollars of revenue value back to the company. That is
huge on the one hand. On the other hand, it
gives our analysts are really smart people UM, the opportunity
in the space to actually analyze bigger, deeper problems and
(03:38):
they can be more future looking. So we're very proud
of that. Again, it's I would say, it's not my
vision per se, but it takes it takes a really
really strong team to bring these things to bear, and
we did that. That's a that's a great example, and
I love that you also you make that relevant to
the idea of freeing up aratunity to tackle bigger problems
(04:01):
and even using the information that you get through one
project to inform you for those bigger problems. In the
world of bigger data we used to say big data,
I think it's even bigger than it was then. Uh.
And in the world of things like machine learning, where
we're able to pair these together in order to understand
underlying trends and underlying factors that determine different things within
(04:24):
business that maybe we're not obvious before because we just
the the information is too big, we can't see the patterns.
I love what you're saying because it's uh, it's exactly
how I feel as well. And you know, in fact, um,
I was talking to some folks about you know and
uh and AI and you know, and the base benefits
that I see these uh uh these technologies actually these
(04:46):
I would say, these thought processes bring to the table.
And the one thing is this imagine so um uh
Imagine if I have a process that takes a week
to complete end to end, um that is seven days,
seven multiplied, you know, twenty four hours a lot of
hours going to that. Imagine if I were able to
achieve that, Uh, in an hour, I've certainly saved, you know,
(05:11):
almost all of seven days of thinking and work. It
almost gives me. So if I'm able to do that,
if I'm able to compress time, that's the one thing
we do not have any control over, its time. If
I'm able to even virtually compressed time, I have some
sort of a crystal ball that can see into the future, um,
which is I've saved almost seven days of my time.
(05:34):
I'm able to drive what the future may hold. And
I think that's that's what gets me really excited about
these texts. Um, just the ability to get decision ng
done faster, but testing and learning done faster. So you know,
if you're gonna make mistakes making faster and learn faster,
that is going to be incredibly exciting. Robbie, the airline
(05:54):
industry obviously very tech heavy industry, both back end and
front end. Can you talk about some of the challenges
that the industry faces and that United particularly has taken
great strides towards solving these various challenges. Yeah, I mean
one of the coolest things we did recently is uh
something called Connections Saver, So United is a is a
(06:16):
very connections heavy airline. We have a very deep domestic
network UM and so folks flyers from cd A to
CDB to get the CDC and the connections UM. And
because this is such a large country, many a time,
a delay anyway up and down the line can result
in a customer or more customers missing out new connections
(06:38):
or their time between connections getting hypercompressed UM. And what
that does is it just creates poor customer experiences, but
also puts a lot of pressure on our frontline teammates
at the airports to recover from those situations. So we
launched this program for Connection Saver. It's a set of
algorithms that looks at and coming lights UH, looks at
(07:01):
how much UM, how much time is left for customers
on let's a flight from Atlanta to Chicago, under to
San Francisco. How much time do they have do they
have left to make the connection UM? And in some
cases what we will do is we will actually hold
the next flight for a few minutes for the customers
to actually make that connection UM. This is kind of
(07:23):
unheard off in the industry because the industry was always
keyed around. We've got a department Time we have something
called dzero like departure within zero minutes of your schedule, um.
And you can imagine, uh, for a customer who is
trying very hard and she wants to get to her destination.
If this is how we measure ourselves, then it's kind
(07:45):
of a wrong way to do it. So the company,
you know, between airport operations and you know, and technology,
this this program is designed to help customers make those connections.
And thus far we've actually saved over fifth the thousands
connections and this was launched I guess the middle of
the year, um, and that's a huge, huge difference to
(08:07):
our customers. It makes you know, we might save on
the D zero, uh, you know, we might not save
in the D zero, but we actually make the connection
for the customer and we complete their journey. Yeah. So
in this case, you might argue that this is a
place where the wrong metric was being held up as
being the most important, at least for the experience of
(08:27):
the customer who has that connection to make. I don't
think that they would necessarily feel better if the team
were to say, well, yeah, you missed your flight, but
on the flip side, that that departing flight left on time.
It's not not a big comfort, but yeah, yeah, it's
to me, it's an outstanding example. And I'm going to
brag a little bit about United where uh, you know,
(08:48):
folks throughout a company are thinking and very innovative and
you know, I wouldn't say it radical, but really really
innovative and you know, deep thinking on how we can
improve cause experience and what are the Because we have
such a big airline, we carry hunh sixteen million people
every year, um, so these small things make a big,
big difference, you know. So it's not just a technology,
(09:11):
it's how our teammates have started thinking about how we
can do better. So it's it's it's a very prideful
thing for us. And as I expect, as airline keeps growing,
connection sables going to become more and more and more
important to United and to our customers well. And and
another challenge I think that we're seeing throughout all industries
(09:34):
right now when it comes to technology is how do
you decide which technologies to adopt and win to implement
and how do you how do you evaluate the technologies
that represent true value versus those that might be more
buzzword ish? How do you go about evaluating these different
technologies and deciding sort of which ones are worth the
(09:58):
risk of investing in versus which ones you might want
to wait and see if there's actually a true implementation, right. UM,
So I think my north star has always been enhancing
customer experience and enhancing employee experience and returning to the shareholders. So, UM,
there is a lot of technology, there's a lot of
(10:18):
I would say, noise in the system. UM. But even
in that noise, there these you know, nuances that we
can pick up on, and you know, we can find
value and tech that light. Uh eight in one of
one or all of these three areas which are just
mentioned is customer experience, employee experience, and uh you know,
shareholder value. And for us, it is creating those those vehicles,
(10:43):
you know, enabling business, enabling experiences that matter the most
for us. UM. At the end of the day, it
has to it has to provide value back, right And
in some cases we see monetary value. But for an airline,
one of the biggest value driver's customer satisfaction and of
course employees hades action. So is what we're doing going
to provide value for that? Um? Certainly you know economic
(11:05):
value is very very important to us as well. All
that being said, you know, so I just talked about
the traditional business case model. All that being said, we
do need to leave room for innovation where in it
is okay to play around with a little bit of
the futuristic tech and bring it back into the folds
of like i'd say, corporate Americans, see how that might
(11:26):
fit in. Yeah, And and one of the things I
wanted to talk about is, you know, the technology that
enables these things to happen. I think of connectivity as
being sort of the backbone for a lot of these
individual pieces of technology, because it's how they communicate with
each other, how they communicate potentially with an end user,
whether that's a customer or an employee. In this world,
(11:46):
as we're seeing of evolving connectivity, with faster connectivity and
more options along those lines, do you see that as
a huge opportunity as well. Absolutely. Uh. You know, I'm
excited for five G to come on mainstream, and I'll
tell you why. It's because our world is becoming a
(12:07):
collection of sensors um you know, whether we subscribe to
them or not. As in material over time, we're gonna
be surrounded by sensors and will be also part of
that sensor community. UM. As this the world becomes bigger
and bigger, the traditional h I would say capabilities of
(12:27):
networks simply will not be able to sustain the kind
of workload that they're being expected to write. So pushing
out compute mode of the edge, pushing out connectivity mode
to the edge. UM, I think it's going to be.
In my opinion, it is going to be a very
very big UH innovation created an animation driver and I'm
(12:49):
off the belief right now. You know, unless stuff changes,
that five G is going to enable that on the edges.
And that's the one place where today we you know,
whether you're an airport, or you're stadium, or you're walking
in them all or wherever you might be. UM being
able to connect at hyper fast speeds, having you know,
(13:10):
gods and gods of bandwidth is going to completely change,
you know, how we think about the solutions you put
in front of people. Airlines expanding, United expanding, which means
we have more capacity, we have more customers flying the systems.
You know, you can see the airports, they're more and
more people flying. UM, it's it's it's such an enablor
for commerce UM and and I think it's it's enabling
(13:35):
customer experiences is great. But moving computing the edge and
the speed of computing, the speed of data UM also
greatly helps our frontline teammates who actually are in the
business of helping customers have great experiences. So it has
it has benefits on both sides of the coin, which
is what makes it such a such a a nice
(13:58):
thing to look forward to. Another should have a hand
for you though. Was we had mentioned earlier about machine
learning and artificial intelligence. Do you have any sort of
dream visions of what that kind of implementation might be
in the future. Yeah. Absolutely, Today if we already do
a fair bit of MLU to create personalization, certainly it
could be a lot deeper. But yeah, my vision is
(14:20):
to give incredibly deep I would say, personal experiences to
consumers because you know, um, you know, in a few
years ago, the industry thought that, you know, customers have
maybe eight or nine personas any you know, that they
might carry when they're traveling. UM. My belief is, and
(14:40):
I might be wrong, but I think I might be
more on the right side of this, is that consumers
can have multitudes of personas depending upon where they are
in their travel experience, UM, what they're going through in
that particular travel experience, what they're expecting at the end
of it. Um. So to be able to grab all
the that interaction data from from our customers and in
(15:04):
every subsequent interaction back with them using what we already
know about them to create better experiences is to me
the holy grail. Because you make the experience great, they
want to come back, uh, and they want to fly
you because they feel that you know them and they
come back. Well, that's that creates commerce, right, that's great
(15:25):
for business. Um So, I think the deep personalization is
definitely you know, the aviation industry has talked a lot
about it. United is I would say pretty forward. Uh.
We we do a pretty good job and we have
some very solid plans going into the next three or
four years to create deep personalization, you know, enable experiences
for our customers. We started that with on a mobile app.
(15:48):
We have you know, gamification that kind of uh you know,
nudges are members to interact with us more so they
get rewards, but they also also get great benefits back
from United and US all based on the machine learning.
So that's incredible. We're gonna take a quick break with
our conversation with Robb, but we'll be right back. You
(16:13):
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(17:52):
thing I wanted to mention or get into is, uh,
the airline industry in particular is one of those where
you have so many different systems that all have to
work together in order for things to to actually work overall. Right,
So can you talk a bit about that challenge. I'm
assuming you have like a really deep test environment where
(18:13):
you go through lots of testing in order to make
sure that all these changes you're putting in that they
work on their own and that they're not breaking anything else. Yeah,
I mean are so our rigor is very deep and
very wide. So you know, we have excellent engineering um
skills here. We also have excellent testing skills here. But
(18:35):
what's most important, we have a very strong governance around
change management and recoverability, you know. So for us, we
know because these are computing systems, they will break. So
preventing the breakage is very very important, but meantime to
recovery is far more important. Right. So when you're when
you're in a live environment and a system goes down
(18:57):
or a component of a system goes down, it is
affecting customers and our employees somewhere, and so for us,
recovering that is very very key for us. But respect
to testing, you know, most of our digital production now
we we have adopted whole higdedly the agile methodology, and
our quality engineers are actually embedded in our paths. So
(19:20):
as we move forward in time, what is happening is
the code that we built out is getting better and
better in terms of quality, not just in terms of
code quality, but also in terms of security. UM. So yeah,
it's firm me, I mean it. We take it very
seriously because you know, I uh, Sunday after Thanksgiving we
carried about five eight thousand customers across the system and
(19:41):
can you imagine if you did not have reliable systems
what they would go through? Um, And so for us,
we we it's very near and dear to us. In
the last three years, UM, I think we've done a
fantastic job here to kind of greatly reduced um, you know,
giving examples, We've reduced our you know, tech related flight
delays by which is huge. And so we we actually
(20:05):
record every impact every flight because of technology, and those
are our KPI s that we we we drive back
into the team um to ensure that we're getting better
every day. That's incredible and and I love that. We
also got into another big challenge that leaders in tech face,
which is that that concept of change management versus the
(20:28):
that desire that I think is deep within any techie
to really explore the new stuff. I think at the
heart of every real technologically oriented person is that that
hacker mentality of I want to learn how this works
and I want to learn what I can do with
it beyond what maybe it was intended to do. But
(20:48):
being able to to balance that with a change management
strategy where you have the space to play in that world.
I mean, my heavy opinion is technologists, especially programmers, are
like artists, and you know, they're very creative beings. And yes,
(21:09):
given half a chance, they will create, and they'll find
many different ways of creating. Uh, But we do you know,
so we we have room for that creativity. We want
to make sure we leave room for that because that's
that's the energy that drives them. But at the same
time they clearly understand, you know, the balance, you know
why we are here, why what we does may impact
(21:32):
you know, uh, customers, employees positively and negatively, and so
we maintain those balances. But it works out pretty well.
Big companies obviously they have a lot of infrastructure, they
got a lot of processes, there's a lot of momentum
built up behind what the things that go on within
a big company. But that also means that it presents
(21:53):
a challenge when you want to implement really sort of
revolutionary changes or or new uh products or new abilities
within existing products. So how do you tackle that particular
challenge when you want to implement something new inside a
a an established company the size of United UH. So
(22:15):
we have very simply puard, we have adopted user centric design.
So you know, before I say all technology teams in
the past, sometimes in the past would have jumped into
engineering first, designs later, but we whole heartedly adopt user
centric design. So what we do is we bring our
stakeholders into the room. So if you're going to roll
(22:37):
something out to our customers. You know, we'll bring a
customer panel from the outside if you're going to roll
something out to a flight attendance, but we bring them
uh into the room. If you're going to roll it
out to the frontline agents, we bring them into the
room and we get them to help us design the
products before we get into engineering. So there's a lot
(22:59):
of design book that goes on there. There's also a
lot of stakeholder management that needs to be done. I'm
gonna put the prognosticator hat on you. Are there any
general trends or any emerging things in technology that you
feel are really poised to make dramatic impacts on industry
(23:20):
in general, the airline industry in particular, Things that that
you cannot wait to get your your hands into that
you really see as being transformative. The new tech out
there is really going to help us solve some deeply
embedded problems in our industry. The cloud providers are really
(23:42):
taking on some massive challenges because they have the I
would say they have the ability to do so, and
they're solving some some very deep challenges that you know,
at the end of the day, what they allow you
to do is they allow your technology teams to operate
at a very very high speed, which they have never
seen before. UM. At the same time, they're providing tool
(24:05):
sets out there that enable uh, you know, very iterative,
very fast paced UH test and learn UH scenarios. So
I think, you know, it's more of a concept, but
that concept, I think is going to be very deeply
embedded and very deeply rooted. And I really think that
you So, when I speak to folks coming out of university, UM, hey,
(24:26):
what do you want to work on? Okay, I want
to work on AI. I want to work on mL
I want to work on robotics. Robotics is going to
be huge. I want to work on autonomous vehicles. UM. Okay.
All of these things are enabled at scale. UM. And
you have to enable these at scale because it doesn't
otherwise it doesn't really matter. UM. And that's where I
(24:47):
think the cloud providers are going to be are going
to be very key you know, in this in this,
in this journey, we'll just take a stab at autonomous vehicles.
I really think there's a huge future for it. I'm
not so sure ab the Roads of Chicago. I think
autonomous vehicles will be very successful as far as long
as there are few and few human beings driving in
(25:08):
the same roads, UM, which is why uh A vs
will be I think really effective in highly controlled environments. UM.
And you know highly regulated environments UM. And somewhere sometime
in the future, I would say, you know, the freeway,
the logistics and the freeways, you know, the big trucks
(25:28):
autonomous or the ramps inside airports right, so again fully autonomous.
But that's I think they out in the future. I mean,
I tell you, I gave an example as in an
Uber yesterday and my driver was from Nigeria, from veals
and you know he's been the US for you know,
many many years. We were just talking about hyper loop UM.
And so this is an Uber driver who immigrated, immigrated
(25:52):
away from his home country thirty years ago and he
sees the future of hyper loop in Africa, connecting the
east coast and the west coast and all the cities
in the middle and that continent, you know, has great potential. UH.
And you know technologies like this, you know, it's instant
emerging tech now that that's hyper loop or bullet trains
(26:13):
or ultra high speed chrains, whatever that might be, UH,
connecting people that comes down to people. Connecting people creates
commerce and creates relationships and you know, social structures, and
and that just has very good connotations to it. So
I think it's it's gonna be very important to do
that and not to let technology go so far ahead
(26:34):
without really connecting the human being back to it. I
couldn't agree with you more. I think that that human
element is one of those things we have to keep
first and foremost in our minds. As exciting as the
prospect is of raw technology to to the tech is
among us, we do occasionally remember, oh, wait, this is
for people. We have to remember that. Uh. And I
(26:56):
fully agree as well that connectivity is in fact key
to at whether it's actually physically connecting communities together through
infrastructure like rail or hyperloop, whether we're talking about wireless
communications connectivity, all these things are enabling that next revolution
(27:17):
in both technological development and the industrial implementation of that technology.
So this has been a phenomenal conversation. So I suppose
i'll conclude with you personally, what is your ideal vision
of a perfect day fifteen years from now, in fifteen
to twenty years, UM, I would like to see men
(27:40):
and women on Mars UM. And I really want that
because you know, the last time the space program UH
kicked in high gear, it created an incredible slew of
offshooting alternate technologies that we hadn't even considered UM. For
us to be able to send human beings all that
(28:01):
distance UM and sustain them and create a sustainable environment
there would, in my opinion, also create a lot of
technologies as a result that would benefit humans who were
still here, you know, whether it's the environment or medicine
or compute or education. I think, Uh, I'm very excited
(28:22):
for that future. And you know, and so when I'm
retired and I can look up in the sky, I
can see, well, we've been there. Yeah. I love that
thought too, and I agree. I think that human ingenuity
is a remarkable resource that we have. And once we
have identified our goal, especially if it's a really hard one,
whether it's getting to the Moon or getting to Mars,
(28:45):
then then we start looking at all, right, well, if
that's our goal, what are the steps we have to
take in order to get there? And we start to
identify what those challenges are, and then we start to
solve for them, and we realize in retrospect we had
that capability to make all that stuff from the beginning.
Finding that that goal, finding that challenge is what drives
(29:07):
people and gives them the motivation and the passion to
tap into that innovative spirit that I think is just
part and parcel with being a human. It's what being
human is, and being able to do that is really exciting. Well,
thank you so much. This has been an incredible conversation,
(29:27):
and uh, I very much look forward to your future.
And if you ever, you know, have a motorcycle you're
you're you're looking to sell, just give me a call. Johnson.
Thank you. It's been a privilege followed you for a
number of years, and I think today was a highlight,
uh that I've had in the last few years. So
thank you very much for the time. Robbie really helped
(29:51):
me better understand how the airline industry can best implement
solutions by finding that delicate balance between innovation implementation and
change management. The real trick is knowing when to put
your thumb down on the scale to tip that balance
when the time is right. His thoughts on how technology
is poised to really revolutionize business operations are inspiring, and
(30:17):
like Robbie, I agree that machine learning, artificial intelligence, and
connectivity will all play vital roles in this future. As
we see five G technologies roll out across the world
will enable unprecedented implementations that will change literally everything about
how we conduct business, from the infrastructure that underlies it
(30:38):
all to the end user experience. In our next episode,
we'll be looking at how Carrie, North Carolina is incorporating
technology to transform how cities work, creating a truly smart
city that uses data to maximize efficiency and provide incredible
value to citizens and visitors alike. I can't wait for
(30:59):
you to hear it. That's on the next The Restless Ones.
This has been The Restless Ones, a production of T
Mobile for Business and I Heart Radio. No matter what
you're after, T Mobile for Business is here with a
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(31:20):
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(31:44):
Learn more at t Mobile for Business dot com.
Welcome to The Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I've spent
the last twelve years covering technology and learning how it works,
demystifying everything from massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and
everything in between. As we stand at the beginning of
a new era of unprecedented connectivity with the rollout of
(00:23):
five G technology, I'm partnering with T Mobile for Business
to sit down with some of the visionary leaders in
technology across all industries to get a better understanding of
how tech and connectivity will change business forever. These leaders
are the pioneers who don't follow trends. They define them.
(00:43):
This show is their story. They are the Restless Ones.
I'm excited for five G to come on mainstream, and
I'll tell you why. It's because our world is becoming
(01:04):
a collection of sensors. Um you know, whether we subscribe
to the monotics in material over time, we're gonna be
surrounded by censors and will be also part of that
sensor community. For the first episode in this series, we
couldn't have picked a better guest than Robbie sim Humbatla,
chief technology officer at United Airlines. Robbie has a long
(01:27):
background in technology and leading teams to come up with
innovative solutions to truly challenging problems. He was employee fifty
three with Virgin Airlines, where he helped create a new
airline that could offer services that more entrenched companies couldn't
at the time. He served for three years as CTO
for air LINGUS before joining United Airlines, where he continues
(01:48):
to chart a course that takes advantage of the latest
technologies in ways that impact all areas of the business,
from back end operations to customer experiences. I started by
a king Robbie if there were any particular technological solutions
he could point to as an example of how his
vision and leadership came into play in overcoming a challenge.
(02:09):
Here's what he had to say. My vision is only
as good as the team that works with me. UM,
So I think in one of the biggest problems for
an airline, so I'll talk about my immediate context is
something called revenue management. And in a nutshell, it is
a science of when should we fill up our planes
(02:30):
with people at what price points? UM, And one of
the big challenges we had about three years ago was
that our existing revenue management system was producing a questionable forecast,
which was forcing our teammates to actually really smart women
and men instead of working on optimizing the forecast the
(02:51):
work and correcting the forecast UM. And if you do that,
you spend a lot of you know, a lot of
your energy and calories and doing things that don't really
add you UM. So the last three years, my team,
along with our revenue management experts, we built a brand
new system called Gemini UM which does what we call
conditional demand forecasting. It has reduced our incidents of errors
(03:15):
against forecasts of bias uh dramatically enough that over the
last two years it has added over six eighty million
dollars of revenue value back to the company. That is
huge on the one hand. On the other hand, it
gives our analysts are really smart people UM, the opportunity
in the space to actually analyze bigger, deeper problems and
(03:38):
they can be more future looking. So we're very proud
of that. Again, it's I would say, it's not my
vision per se, but it takes it takes a really
really strong team to bring these things to bear, and
we did that. That's a that's a great example, and
I love that you also you make that relevant to
the idea of freeing up aratunity to tackle bigger problems
(04:01):
and even using the information that you get through one
project to inform you for those bigger problems. In the
world of bigger data we used to say big data,
I think it's even bigger than it was then. Uh.
And in the world of things like machine learning, where
we're able to pair these together in order to understand
underlying trends and underlying factors that determine different things within
(04:24):
business that maybe we're not obvious before because we just
the the information is too big, we can't see the patterns.
I love what you're saying because it's uh, it's exactly
how I feel as well. And you know, in fact, um,
I was talking to some folks about you know and
uh and AI and you know, and the base benefits
that I see these uh uh these technologies actually these
(04:46):
I would say, these thought processes bring to the table.
And the one thing is this imagine so um uh
Imagine if I have a process that takes a week
to complete end to end, um that is seven days,
seven multiplied, you know, twenty four hours a lot of
hours going to that. Imagine if I were able to
achieve that, Uh, in an hour, I've certainly saved, you know,
(05:11):
almost all of seven days of thinking and work. It
almost gives me. So if I'm able to do that,
if I'm able to compress time, that's the one thing
we do not have any control over, its time. If
I'm able to even virtually compressed time, I have some
sort of a crystal ball that can see into the future, um,
which is I've saved almost seven days of my time.
(05:34):
I'm able to drive what the future may hold. And
I think that's that's what gets me really excited about
these texts. Um, just the ability to get decision ng
done faster, but testing and learning done faster. So you know,
if you're gonna make mistakes making faster and learn faster,
that is going to be incredibly exciting. Robbie, the airline
(05:54):
industry obviously very tech heavy industry, both back end and
front end. Can you talk about some of the challenges
that the industry faces and that United particularly has taken
great strides towards solving these various challenges. Yeah, I mean
one of the coolest things we did recently is uh
something called Connections Saver, So United is a is a
(06:16):
very connections heavy airline. We have a very deep domestic
network UM and so folks flyers from cd A to
CDB to get the CDC and the connections UM. And
because this is such a large country, many a time,
a delay anyway up and down the line can result
in a customer or more customers missing out new connections
(06:38):
or their time between connections getting hypercompressed UM. And what
that does is it just creates poor customer experiences, but
also puts a lot of pressure on our frontline teammates
at the airports to recover from those situations. So we
launched this program for Connection Saver. It's a set of
algorithms that looks at and coming lights UH, looks at
(07:01):
how much UM, how much time is left for customers
on let's a flight from Atlanta to Chicago, under to
San Francisco. How much time do they have do they
have left to make the connection UM? And in some
cases what we will do is we will actually hold
the next flight for a few minutes for the customers
to actually make that connection UM. This is kind of
(07:23):
unheard off in the industry because the industry was always
keyed around. We've got a department Time we have something
called dzero like departure within zero minutes of your schedule, um.
And you can imagine, uh, for a customer who is
trying very hard and she wants to get to her destination.
If this is how we measure ourselves, then it's kind
(07:45):
of a wrong way to do it. So the company,
you know, between airport operations and you know, and technology,
this this program is designed to help customers make those connections.
And thus far we've actually saved over fifth the thousands
connections and this was launched I guess the middle of
the year, um, and that's a huge, huge difference to
(08:07):
our customers. It makes you know, we might save on
the D zero, uh, you know, we might not save
in the D zero, but we actually make the connection
for the customer and we complete their journey. Yeah. So
in this case, you might argue that this is a
place where the wrong metric was being held up as
being the most important, at least for the experience of
(08:27):
the customer who has that connection to make. I don't
think that they would necessarily feel better if the team
were to say, well, yeah, you missed your flight, but
on the flip side, that that departing flight left on time.
It's not not a big comfort, but yeah, yeah, it's
to me, it's an outstanding example. And I'm going to
brag a little bit about United where uh, you know,
(08:48):
folks throughout a company are thinking and very innovative and
you know, I wouldn't say it radical, but really really
innovative and you know, deep thinking on how we can
improve cause experience and what are the Because we have
such a big airline, we carry hunh sixteen million people
every year, um, so these small things make a big,
big difference, you know. So it's not just a technology,
(09:11):
it's how our teammates have started thinking about how we
can do better. So it's it's it's a very prideful
thing for us. And as I expect, as airline keeps growing,
connection sables going to become more and more and more
important to United and to our customers well. And and
another challenge I think that we're seeing throughout all industries
(09:34):
right now when it comes to technology is how do
you decide which technologies to adopt and win to implement
and how do you how do you evaluate the technologies
that represent true value versus those that might be more
buzzword ish? How do you go about evaluating these different
technologies and deciding sort of which ones are worth the
(09:58):
risk of investing in versus which ones you might want
to wait and see if there's actually a true implementation, right. UM,
So I think my north star has always been enhancing
customer experience and enhancing employee experience and returning to the shareholders. So, UM,
there is a lot of technology, there's a lot of
(10:18):
I would say, noise in the system. UM. But even
in that noise, there these you know, nuances that we
can pick up on, and you know, we can find
value and tech that light. Uh eight in one of
one or all of these three areas which are just
mentioned is customer experience, employee experience, and uh you know,
shareholder value. And for us, it is creating those those vehicles,
(10:43):
you know, enabling business, enabling experiences that matter the most
for us. UM. At the end of the day, it
has to it has to provide value back, right And
in some cases we see monetary value. But for an airline,
one of the biggest value driver's customer satisfaction and of
course employees hades action. So is what we're doing going
to provide value for that? Um? Certainly you know economic
(11:05):
value is very very important to us as well. All
that being said, you know, so I just talked about
the traditional business case model. All that being said, we
do need to leave room for innovation where in it
is okay to play around with a little bit of
the futuristic tech and bring it back into the folds
of like i'd say, corporate Americans, see how that might
(11:26):
fit in. Yeah, And and one of the things I
wanted to talk about is, you know, the technology that
enables these things to happen. I think of connectivity as
being sort of the backbone for a lot of these
individual pieces of technology, because it's how they communicate with
each other, how they communicate potentially with an end user,
whether that's a customer or an employee. In this world,
(11:46):
as we're seeing of evolving connectivity, with faster connectivity and
more options along those lines, do you see that as
a huge opportunity as well. Absolutely. Uh. You know, I'm
excited for five G to come on mainstream, and I'll
tell you why. It's because our world is becoming a
(12:07):
collection of sensors um you know, whether we subscribe to
them or not. As in material over time, we're gonna
be surrounded by sensors and will be also part of
that sensor community. UM. As this the world becomes bigger
and bigger, the traditional h I would say capabilities of
(12:27):
networks simply will not be able to sustain the kind
of workload that they're being expected to write. So pushing
out compute mode of the edge, pushing out connectivity mode
to the edge. UM, I think it's going to be.
In my opinion, it is going to be a very
very big UH innovation created an animation driver and I'm
(12:49):
off the belief right now. You know, unless stuff changes,
that five G is going to enable that on the edges.
And that's the one place where today we you know,
whether you're an airport, or you're stadium, or you're walking
in them all or wherever you might be. UM being
able to connect at hyper fast speeds, having you know,
(13:10):
gods and gods of bandwidth is going to completely change,
you know, how we think about the solutions you put
in front of people. Airlines expanding, United expanding, which means
we have more capacity, we have more customers flying the systems.
You know, you can see the airports, they're more and
more people flying. UM, it's it's it's such an enablor
for commerce UM and and I think it's it's enabling
(13:35):
customer experiences is great. But moving computing the edge and
the speed of computing, the speed of data UM also
greatly helps our frontline teammates who actually are in the
business of helping customers have great experiences. So it has
it has benefits on both sides of the coin, which
is what makes it such a such a a nice
(13:58):
thing to look forward to. Another should have a hand
for you though. Was we had mentioned earlier about machine
learning and artificial intelligence. Do you have any sort of
dream visions of what that kind of implementation might be
in the future. Yeah. Absolutely, Today if we already do
a fair bit of MLU to create personalization, certainly it
could be a lot deeper. But yeah, my vision is
(14:20):
to give incredibly deep I would say, personal experiences to
consumers because you know, um, you know, in a few
years ago, the industry thought that, you know, customers have
maybe eight or nine personas any you know, that they
might carry when they're traveling. UM. My belief is, and
(14:40):
I might be wrong, but I think I might be
more on the right side of this, is that consumers
can have multitudes of personas depending upon where they are
in their travel experience, UM, what they're going through in
that particular travel experience, what they're expecting at the end
of it. Um. So to be able to grab all
the that interaction data from from our customers and in
(15:04):
every subsequent interaction back with them using what we already
know about them to create better experiences is to me
the holy grail. Because you make the experience great, they
want to come back, uh, and they want to fly
you because they feel that you know them and they
come back. Well, that's that creates commerce, right, that's great
(15:25):
for business. Um So, I think the deep personalization is
definitely you know, the aviation industry has talked a lot
about it. United is I would say pretty forward. Uh.
We we do a pretty good job and we have
some very solid plans going into the next three or
four years to create deep personalization, you know, enable experiences
for our customers. We started that with on a mobile app.
(15:48):
We have you know, gamification that kind of uh you know,
nudges are members to interact with us more so they
get rewards, but they also also get great benefits back
from United and US all based on the machine learning.
So that's incredible. We're gonna take a quick break with
our conversation with Robb, but we'll be right back. You
(16:13):
know who you are, A boundary pusher, a big thinker
in the relentless pursuit of the next big innovation for
your business. T Mobile for Business knows that the future
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(16:36):
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(16:57):
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they walk us through a mobile revolution that will start
to change the future of business and the way we
(17:19):
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This Time Tomorrow is now available on the I Heart
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(17:52):
thing I wanted to mention or get into is, uh,
the airline industry in particular is one of those where
you have so many different systems that all have to
work together in order for things to to actually work overall. Right,
So can you talk a bit about that challenge. I'm
assuming you have like a really deep test environment where
(18:13):
you go through lots of testing in order to make
sure that all these changes you're putting in that they
work on their own and that they're not breaking anything else. Yeah,
I mean are so our rigor is very deep and
very wide. So you know, we have excellent engineering um
skills here. We also have excellent testing skills here. But
(18:35):
what's most important, we have a very strong governance around
change management and recoverability, you know. So for us, we
know because these are computing systems, they will break. So
preventing the breakage is very very important, but meantime to
recovery is far more important. Right. So when you're when
you're in a live environment and a system goes down
(18:57):
or a component of a system goes down, it is
affecting customers and our employees somewhere, and so for us,
recovering that is very very key for us. But respect
to testing, you know, most of our digital production now
we we have adopted whole higdedly the agile methodology, and
our quality engineers are actually embedded in our paths. So
(19:20):
as we move forward in time, what is happening is
the code that we built out is getting better and
better in terms of quality, not just in terms of
code quality, but also in terms of security. UM. So yeah,
it's firm me, I mean it. We take it very
seriously because you know, I uh, Sunday after Thanksgiving we
carried about five eight thousand customers across the system and
(19:41):
can you imagine if you did not have reliable systems
what they would go through? Um, And so for us,
we we it's very near and dear to us. In
the last three years, UM, I think we've done a
fantastic job here to kind of greatly reduced um, you know,
giving examples, We've reduced our you know, tech related flight
delays by which is huge. And so we we actually
(20:05):
record every impact every flight because of technology, and those
are our KPI s that we we we drive back
into the team um to ensure that we're getting better
every day. That's incredible and and I love that. We
also got into another big challenge that leaders in tech face,
which is that that concept of change management versus the
(20:28):
that desire that I think is deep within any techie
to really explore the new stuff. I think at the
heart of every real technologically oriented person is that that
hacker mentality of I want to learn how this works
and I want to learn what I can do with
it beyond what maybe it was intended to do. But
(20:48):
being able to to balance that with a change management
strategy where you have the space to play in that world.
I mean, my heavy opinion is technologists, especially programmers, are
like artists, and you know, they're very creative beings. And yes,
(21:09):
given half a chance, they will create, and they'll find
many different ways of creating. Uh, But we do you know,
so we we have room for that creativity. We want
to make sure we leave room for that because that's
that's the energy that drives them. But at the same
time they clearly understand, you know, the balance, you know
why we are here, why what we does may impact
(21:32):
you know, uh, customers, employees positively and negatively, and so
we maintain those balances. But it works out pretty well.
Big companies obviously they have a lot of infrastructure, they
got a lot of processes, there's a lot of momentum
built up behind what the things that go on within
a big company. But that also means that it presents
(21:53):
a challenge when you want to implement really sort of
revolutionary changes or or new uh products or new abilities
within existing products. So how do you tackle that particular
challenge when you want to implement something new inside a
a an established company the size of United UH. So
(22:15):
we have very simply puard, we have adopted user centric design.
So you know, before I say all technology teams in
the past, sometimes in the past would have jumped into
engineering first, designs later, but we whole heartedly adopt user
centric design. So what we do is we bring our
stakeholders into the room. So if you're going to roll
(22:37):
something out to our customers. You know, we'll bring a
customer panel from the outside if you're going to roll
something out to a flight attendance, but we bring them
uh into the room. If you're going to roll it
out to the frontline agents, we bring them into the
room and we get them to help us design the
products before we get into engineering. So there's a lot
(22:59):
of design book that goes on there. There's also a
lot of stakeholder management that needs to be done. I'm
gonna put the prognosticator hat on you. Are there any
general trends or any emerging things in technology that you
feel are really poised to make dramatic impacts on industry
(23:20):
in general, the airline industry in particular, Things that that
you cannot wait to get your your hands into that
you really see as being transformative. The new tech out
there is really going to help us solve some deeply
embedded problems in our industry. The cloud providers are really
(23:42):
taking on some massive challenges because they have the I
would say they have the ability to do so, and
they're solving some some very deep challenges that you know,
at the end of the day, what they allow you
to do is they allow your technology teams to operate
at a very very high speed, which they have never
seen before. UM. At the same time, they're providing tool
(24:05):
sets out there that enable uh, you know, very iterative,
very fast paced UH test and learn UH scenarios. So
I think, you know, it's more of a concept, but
that concept, I think is going to be very deeply
embedded and very deeply rooted. And I really think that
you So, when I speak to folks coming out of university, UM, hey,
(24:26):
what do you want to work on? Okay, I want
to work on AI. I want to work on mL
I want to work on robotics. Robotics is going to
be huge. I want to work on autonomous vehicles. UM. Okay.
All of these things are enabled at scale. UM. And
you have to enable these at scale because it doesn't
otherwise it doesn't really matter. UM. And that's where I
(24:47):
think the cloud providers are going to be are going
to be very key you know, in this in this,
in this journey, we'll just take a stab at autonomous vehicles.
I really think there's a huge future for it. I'm
not so sure ab the Roads of Chicago. I think
autonomous vehicles will be very successful as far as long
as there are few and few human beings driving in
(25:08):
the same roads, UM, which is why uh A vs
will be I think really effective in highly controlled environments. UM.
And you know highly regulated environments UM. And somewhere sometime
in the future, I would say, you know, the freeway,
the logistics and the freeways, you know, the big trucks
(25:28):
autonomous or the ramps inside airports right, so again fully autonomous.
But that's I think they out in the future. I mean,
I tell you, I gave an example as in an
Uber yesterday and my driver was from Nigeria, from veals
and you know he's been the US for you know,
many many years. We were just talking about hyper loop UM.
And so this is an Uber driver who immigrated, immigrated
(25:52):
away from his home country thirty years ago and he
sees the future of hyper loop in Africa, connecting the
east coast and the west coast and all the cities
in the middle and that continent, you know, has great potential. UH.
And you know technologies like this, you know, it's instant
emerging tech now that that's hyper loop or bullet trains
(26:13):
or ultra high speed chrains, whatever that might be, UH,
connecting people that comes down to people. Connecting people creates
commerce and creates relationships and you know, social structures, and
and that just has very good connotations to it. So
I think it's it's gonna be very important to do
that and not to let technology go so far ahead
(26:34):
without really connecting the human being back to it. I
couldn't agree with you more. I think that that human
element is one of those things we have to keep
first and foremost in our minds. As exciting as the
prospect is of raw technology to to the tech is
among us, we do occasionally remember, oh, wait, this is
for people. We have to remember that. Uh. And I
(26:56):
fully agree as well that connectivity is in fact key
to at whether it's actually physically connecting communities together through
infrastructure like rail or hyperloop, whether we're talking about wireless
communications connectivity, all these things are enabling that next revolution
(27:17):
in both technological development and the industrial implementation of that technology.
So this has been a phenomenal conversation. So I suppose
i'll conclude with you personally, what is your ideal vision
of a perfect day fifteen years from now, in fifteen
to twenty years, UM, I would like to see men
(27:40):
and women on Mars UM. And I really want that
because you know, the last time the space program UH
kicked in high gear, it created an incredible slew of
offshooting alternate technologies that we hadn't even considered UM. For
us to be able to send human beings all that
(28:01):
distance UM and sustain them and create a sustainable environment
there would, in my opinion, also create a lot of
technologies as a result that would benefit humans who were
still here, you know, whether it's the environment or medicine
or compute or education. I think, Uh, I'm very excited
(28:22):
for that future. And you know, and so when I'm
retired and I can look up in the sky, I
can see, well, we've been there. Yeah. I love that
thought too, and I agree. I think that human ingenuity
is a remarkable resource that we have. And once we
have identified our goal, especially if it's a really hard one,
whether it's getting to the Moon or getting to Mars,
(28:45):
then then we start looking at all, right, well, if
that's our goal, what are the steps we have to
take in order to get there? And we start to
identify what those challenges are, and then we start to
solve for them, and we realize in retrospect we had
that capability to make all that stuff from the beginning.
Finding that that goal, finding that challenge is what drives
(29:07):
people and gives them the motivation and the passion to
tap into that innovative spirit that I think is just
part and parcel with being a human. It's what being
human is, and being able to do that is really exciting. Well,
thank you so much. This has been an incredible conversation,
(29:27):
and uh, I very much look forward to your future.
And if you ever, you know, have a motorcycle you're
you're you're looking to sell, just give me a call. Johnson.
Thank you. It's been a privilege followed you for a
number of years, and I think today was a highlight,
uh that I've had in the last few years. So
thank you very much for the time. Robbie really helped
(29:51):
me better understand how the airline industry can best implement
solutions by finding that delicate balance between innovation implementation and
change management. The real trick is knowing when to put
your thumb down on the scale to tip that balance
when the time is right. His thoughts on how technology
is poised to really revolutionize business operations are inspiring, and
(30:17):
like Robbie, I agree that machine learning, artificial intelligence, and
connectivity will all play vital roles in this future. As
we see five G technologies roll out across the world
will enable unprecedented implementations that will change literally everything about
how we conduct business, from the infrastructure that underlies it
(30:38):
all to the end user experience. In our next episode,
we'll be looking at how Carrie, North Carolina is incorporating
technology to transform how cities work, creating a truly smart
city that uses data to maximize efficiency and provide incredible
value to citizens and visitors alike. I can't wait for
(30:59):
you to hear it. That's on the next The Restless Ones.
This has been The Restless Ones, a production of T
Mobile for Business and I Heart Radio. No matter what
you're after, T Mobile for Business is here with a
network born mobile and built from the ground up for
(31:20):
the next wave of innovation, from mobile broadband to IoT
to workforce mobility, and everything in between. T Mobile for
Business is committed to helping innovative decision makers like you
move your business forward with the products and services you need,
as well as the dedicated, award winning service your business
expects from America's most loved wireless company. Business is changing
(31:44):
Learn more at t Mobile for Business dot com.
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