Delta just finished rolling out an AI assistant called Delta Concierge to every single one of its SkyMiles loyalty members. The tool lives inside the Delta app and can cancel a flight, request a refund, track a bag, or help during a delay, all without a customer needing to call anyone. The company started testing it in beta less than a year ago and now it covers all members, not a small pilot group.
What makes this worth paying attention to is not the chatbot itself. Every airline now has one. It's who Delta put in charge of building it. Amala Duggirala joined Delta in January 2026 in a role that did not exist before her: she runs both the company's core technology systems and its digital products, two jobs that used to belong to separate executives. She reports directly to CEO Ed Bastian and sits on the leadership committee, meaning AI decisions now get made at the very top of the company, not buried in an IT department.
Days into the job, she published an essay laying out a simple argument that every business owner should sit with. Buying AI software is the easy part. Getting your own staff to change how they work because of it is the hard part. She has said the technology is just the vehicle, and the people using it are what actually moves the company forward. She's warned that sitting back and waiting to see how AI plays out is itself a risky choice, not a safe one, because competitors who move now will pull ahead.
This is not a new idea for her. Before Delta, she ran technology at USAA, the financial services company for military members, where she trained roughly 38,000 employees on how to work alongside AI and helped the company build out more than 200 AI tools. She is now applying the same approach at an airline: train the people first, then roll out the tool widely, rather than the other way around.
Delta already has a working example of what this looks like when it pays off. At its Atlanta hub, a tool called Baggage AI tells baggage handlers which bag to grab first and gives them the fastest driving route across the airfield, recalculating every two minutes as flights change. Delta says this lifted bag transfer success by close to 30%, which matters because Atlanta is the airport where nearly 40% of all Delta passengers pass through and a missed transfer means a lost bag.
But the same industry offers a warning about moving too fast. American Airlines has had its automated rebooking system change customers' seats and itineraries without asking first, creating real headaches for travelers. And Air Canada was ordered by a Canadian tribunal to pay a customer after its chatbot gave him wrong information about a refund policy, with the tribunal ruling the airline was responsible for what its own AI told people.
The lesson for any business, not just airlines, is that customer facing AI tools need a human backstop and clear accountability before they go out to everyone. Delta's approach, training leadership first and rolling out slowly under one accountable executive, is the more careful version of a race that a lot of companies are running badly.