Jeppesen ForeFlight pushes aviation-specific AI with a human touch

Digital business insists it is taking a different approach with its agentic artificial intelligence platform.

To Brad Surak, artificial intelligence is “over-hyped”. This might seem an odd sentiment from the chief executive of a business — Jeppesen ForeFlight — that has just announced its own agentic AI platform and who believes the aviation industry is “entering its most consequential technology transition in a generation”.

However, Surak’s point is that, while a host of generic AI tools on the market give the impression they make life simpler for airline operations professionals, in a safety-obsessed sector like commercial aviation, basing decisions on inaccurate or even incomplete information can damage a carrier’s reputation or even endanger safety.

“Generic AI is confident but it is often wrong, even if it sounds authoritative,” Surak told around 400 Jeppesen ForeFlight users at its Connect 26 event in Paris on 6 October, where the company was unveiling the first features of its new AI platform, Airflow. “In many industries getting it wrong is an inconvenience; in ours it can be a matter of safety.”

Surak — who describes Airflow as “an intelligence layer on top of everything we do” rather than a product in its own right — says what differentiates the technology from other AI tools is a layered approach that includes sourcing only from “certified inputs” and “reasoning in context”, including “understanding how aviation works and how your airline works”.

Key to the Airflow philosophy is user, or what Jeppesen ForeFlight calls “community”, engagement. “The more you use Airflow, the more it becomes relevant to your airline,” says Surak, who has led the company since Boeing sold its digital services business to software investment house Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion last year.

Airlines can adopt the AI “at their own pace, with their own mix of tools”, with humans ‘in the loop’ at every stage. Every answer comes with the facts, sources and reasoning behind it, so users can use it as a decision-supporting tool rather than taking advice at face-value, says Surak. The idea is the more operators use it, the better it gets, and the more they will trust it.

Jeppesen ForeFlight began working on its AI platform in early 2023, says Surak. It was shortly after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the first mainstream generative AI system. ChatGPT’s arrival has been followed by a host of others, including Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Copilot from Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s Grok.

Surak sees Jeppesen ForeFlight’s move into AI as just the latest step in a succession of innovations over many decades by the company, which was founded when Salt Lake City-based pilot Elrey Jeppesen started offering his hand-drawn charts to other aviators to help them navigate safely in the mid-1930s.

“We have been at the forefront of new technologies for 92 years, and I look at what we are doing with Airflow as part of a continuum,” he says. “We set the standard in navigational data and charts, and we have spent the past three years getting our AI platform to the same level of safety.”

Although Jeppesen ForeFlight announced Airflow in July, this is the first time it has given detail on specific capabilities – or agents – of which it eventually plans more than 150. Two of the initial three are designed to help with crew rostering; the third targets what the company calls “one of aviation’s hardest AI problems” – flight disruption.

The latter, promises Jeppesen ForeFlight, will help operations controllers to assess, for instance, where to divert incoming aircraft during an unexpected storm, taking into account not just which nearby alternative airports are available, but the impact on the likes of subsequent crew availability and flight connections for passengers on each aircraft.

Agents aimed at business and military aviation operators will “debut soon”, says the company, as part of a plan by Jeppesen ForeFlight to “grow the platform across every market it serves”. It plans to spend the next few weeks finessing the technology with a small number of customers before a broader rollout early next year.

While Jeppesen ForeFlight began working on Airflow while still part of Boeing, Surak says the divestment – which included the previously separate Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AerData, and OzRunways entities – has given it more freedom. Boeing had owned Jeppesen since 2000, with ForeFlight, which specialised in electronic flight bag software, joining in 2019.

“It’s been a really amazing year. We’re now able to operate as a world-class software company and shed some of the bureaucratic layers that came with being part of a manufacturer,” he says. “Being owned by Thoma Bravo has also allowed us to build new relationships in the software industry.”

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