AWS, Head of EMEA Travel Industry, Nikiforos Chatzopoulos at the CAPA Asia Aviation Summit 2022

Transcript

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:I believe technology is not only keeping up with consumer demand, it's actually going even faster. And this is where we need, you know, most of the technology companies to put the brakes a little bit on and start hearing about our customers, what exactly they want. In Amazon, we are notorious about hearing our customers and making all of our decisions from feedback we got from customers. But at the same time, we're not resting on that only. We just start thinking about what's coming up next. What are the innovations that are going to be changing the landscape, the technology landscape, and what else we can do, you know, to delight them even further? And not only our customers, but also our customers' customers. So we always, when we're having discussions with airlines or with airports, we always take the seat of a passenger and start the discussions from there, working backwards into the requirements that those passengers, those customers would like actually to address. Well, it's not only the role I have, it's I'm an industry expert, so I come from the industry. I'm coming with 20 years background in the airports, airlines, and ground handling agents, but in the last 10 years with the technology. So that kind of breadth and depth of industry and technology understanding, business and technology understanding is actually residing in a big team that we have within AWS. And this is where we actually were coming and we start instigating those discussions with our customers, understanding their landscape, understanding their requirements, understanding their challenges, and be able to speak the same language. I think that goes a long way into be able to not lose time, actually capture the data they need and then help them to say, okay, you know, the data that you would like to capture on the airport side of things, if you're talking to an airline or within an OTA or with a retailer or with any other major stakeholder that has customer touchpoints, are there and we can help you to do that. And that's, I think, where we differentiate in the market right now. It's not only about, you know, the Australian breaches, cybersecurity breaches we've had. We've seen that in a lot of airlines. Just recently there were some publicity around those. The most beneficial part that AWS has is that their contact centers, sorry, the cloud centers are actually residing on a very secure infrastructure, cybersecurity infrastructure layer. And it's not only about the cybersecurity or infrastructure layer that we have, it's also the physical security we have around it. So we are constantly reassessing our processes, we are constantly reassessing our people, And we have methodologies and techniques and mechanisms to always ensure that whatever layer we're actually building for our customers is first of all secure first and then the rest of the way. So we always start with landing zones, we always start with cybersecurity, we always start with security layers, we always start with, you know, having security in mind of what the potential threats and dangers are actually going to come. from outside. And this is where actually we start building and discussing with our customers. Well, now we have— I just recently had the discussion, and I will continue those discussions with a major airline in Europe where we are going into parallel streams. So we have a team working only for the cybersecurity part of it and educating our customers not only to have a secure environment, but how they can respond to security threats, how they can educate their employees to be secure first in their mindset. And the second work stream is actually how we digitally transform them into their business. It is hugely important, provided it has— it is done correctly. So I heard a lot about personalization and I spoke about personalization before in the panel, but how you do the proper personalization resides in capturing the right data to do that kind of personalization. And at this point in time, personalization sits in one or two domains and it's not a true personalization. It's just, ah, make sense of 20% of that customer. But I will never be able to capture and grasp all of the demand and predict those kind of demands and consumer behaviors that is going to come in the future if I don't have this Customer 360 platform that we're actually putting up now. So it's an available solution, but I think a true unified customer repository of data, and I spoke before about the single source of truth for each and every of the business verticals, will actually differentiate because the single source of truth for sales and the single source of truth for operations or marketing will be combined into meaningful insights that will be enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence. And then they will give those kind of predictions and those kind of insights for the next best action to happen. And this is what true personalization means, not only just capturing data from here and there and just put them together in a data lake. Thank you.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.