Introduction and Welcome

Yeah also from my side a warm welcome to all of you here. Super happy to host this together with MindStone.

We have participated in their trainings before they have been great. I think it's really sort of pushed AI adoption within Lufthansa Innovation Hub which has been pretty cool.

Let me just put this here so doesn't look so off. Can you still hear me? Should be fine right?

Super! Yeah so So welcome.

Maybe a quick show of hands, because I think we have some Lufthansa group colleagues here, right? Who's from the aviation industry? Okay. Or from Lufthansa? I see. Okay. Super. Very nice to have you here.

We also like to bring together the Berlin -based community, right? Aviation startups, we also look at travel and mobility more broadly. But generally speaking, to everyone here, let's connect. If you have any questions, feel free to shout out at any time.

What Lufthansa Innovation Hub Does

And I'm going to start with a quick introduction into Lufthansa Innovation Hub, because I think a lot of you are here for the first time.

Bridging the Innovation Gap in a Large Organization

And yeah, why we exist is basically to fill this innovation gap, the innovation gap between the organizational adoption of technology here on the lower end, basically a classic maturity curve.

Technological progress in many organizations is rather slow, it hits the ceiling, it starts new with every new technology, with every new use case. meanwhile the speed of technological progress is exponential right here on

the left side we see it with AI every day right a couple of years ago tools like chat GPT didn't exist but now they are already dominating our organizational our personal context when it comes to productivity and this is one of the reasons why we exist to fill this innovation gap between technological progress and between organizational adoption especially within a major major

incumbent dinosaur company like airlines in general but also like Lufthansa Group, right? Slow moving and we try to be that speedboat. That speedboat that connects to a technological progress but also to the ecosystem, right?

So we are in many ways also an ecosystem partner between Lufthansa Group and between the startup landscape, the travel tech ecosystem.

Reason for that being that a lot of the best practices that we see in the realms of adoption of, for example, AI but also other technologies don't necessarily happen in the incumbent landscape first but happen within the startup landscape right so we try and kind of chart what's happening out there

and to also give an inside out perspective to Lufthansa group and that's why our mission is to accelerate the next in travel because we believe that the next in travel is yet to be built

Three Core Capabilities: Decode, Realize, Transform

sounds complicated it gets a little bit easier when I break it down because we have three main main capabilities here on the left. We decode the next. This is the strategic intelligence team.

We do research. I'll show you a little bit more about what we do in a second.

We have our new business capability here in the middle to realize the next by partnering with startups, by building platforms and MVPs ourselves.

And then we have here our third pillar, the transformation capability that also creates trainings and learning journeys to foster a culture of innovation.

Strategic Intelligence: Research and Industry Insights

So, within the strategic intelligence capability, one of the main things we do is we create research. So, your standard, you know, research reports, research articles are also within our scope where we look at, you know, travel and mobility more broadly.

We put out basically all of our research commentary publicly via TNMT .com, including, for example, investment reports, but also including technological deep dives.

And we also share that knowledge via our bi -weekly newsletter, which is actually one of the, let's say, industry deep dives, especially in the space of aviation and innovation, travel and mobility and innovation, right? So we are also a fairly well -known outlet at this point.

New Business: Partnering and Building New Ventures

Then within our new business capability, this is where we get closer and closer to the startup landscape and how the startup landscape operates. For example, we partner with startups. startups.

For those of you who have heard of venture clienting, this is one of the main vehicles that we develop currently.

Venture clienting being we help business units within Lufthansa Group understand their major pain points and we scope out relevant startups that could help them solve this pain point and then we basically support the entire process from startup scouting to POC scoping, right,

sort of deciding what the startup will tackle, what pain point is particularly relevant, and then also help Lufthansa group divisions track those outcomes, right, measure that impact.

And these are a couple of different partnerships we've had. For those of you who have traveled through Munich T2 recently, you might have seen these robots driving around by autonomy. This was also a collaboration that we supported through Lufthansa Innovation Hub.

But we have a lot of different use cases in that realm. So if you're interested, you know hit me up anytime We also do

Venture development meaning we build our own startups.

We have a team of roughly 20 venture developers that Yeah that look for new ideas within the realm of aviation within the realm of travel and mobility

Validate that idea create MVPs and then through a fairly sophisticated process decide whether to scale, whether to spin in, whether to spin out.

And this is also something where we have a stronghold in and this is also one of our main capabilities when it comes to being that speedboat, right?

Some solutions, some platforms would take a long time to develop within a very corporate landscape, but we can do that in a very short amount of time within, let's say, a very stringent set

of methodological criteria to decide whether or not the solution is valid or not. Right.

Transformation: Training and Learning Journeys (Including AI)

And then lastly, our transformation team is actually also an absolute stronghold, super relevant for today in the context of AI, because I think we are all on our individual learning journeys when it comes to that, right?

And transformation team has a lot of different topics that they use, that they develop for learning formats, for trainings, both for Lufthansa Group and for externals, with a lot of you know different let's say topic areas like future literacy like innovation culture right but an increasingly important portion of that is also um the ai related trainings right

we've had a lot of demand for ai augmented leadership trainings this is where leaders within lufthansa group but also externally try and understand how ai will impact their leadership style how it can help them become more productive um how it can help them become more efficient and and how it can impact their decision -making process in the long term, right?

But decoding gen AI is also a fantastic training where we've had a lot of successes enabling smaller teams and groups of people to really utilize generative AI to the best, let's say, productivity standard that is relevant to their jobs.

Cool. Yeah, so we do workshops. We also do tailored workshops. The team also does a lot of different keynotes

on fostering a culture of innovation. So, yeah, if this is a topic for you, let's connect as well. You might have seen some of our people at KIX Conference or at Innovators Conference or at LearnTech last year. This is where we are quite often, yeah, available as speakers.

Cool. Any questions so far? No? All right.

Today’s Theme: Human Trip, Machine Journey

Then I'll get started with our topic for today, which was human trip, machine journey, AI, and the new traveler experience. This is a pretty broad topic, right?

This is our theoretical talk for today and my main ambition here is to actually give you a little bit of context into how we look at AI within Lufthansa Innovation Hub, why it's relevant for us and what are some of the opportunity spaces that we try and dig deeper into.

The “Resolution Gap” in the Traveler Journey

And the reason we look at AI as a technology is because in the end the traveler journey is very fragmented from an operational perspective and it's also very fragmented in the view of the operator, right? You, as a traveler, understand what your journey looks like, you understand your frustrations. We don't necessarily know everything.

And this is what we call the resolution gap, where on the left side you see the macro level. You see a low resolution picture. This is what the airline sees when you travel. It's not a lot.

We think there's probably a human there, maybe two humans, hopefully it was a human that made the booking. We maybe don't know anymore. anymore. But the main point being, the data we have available on customers is limited, is fragmented, right? It's very difficult to get a full picture.

And most of all, we don't necessarily understand your preferences, your needs, your feelings, respective to the journey, right?

On the right hand, we see the actual traveler journey, right? How you feel. You see it in high resolution. That's your unique experience.

When you walk through that airport and you're standing at the check -in counter, wondering where to go next, wondering wondering if you have to pay extra for your luggage. Those are the concerns, the experiences, and also the emotions that we face going through the traveler journey, going through the airport journey, which can, of course, be extremely frustrating.

Time Gap: Real-Time Traveler Needs vs. Decade-Scale Airline Planning

But there is a gap between that. And this gap exists both in the physical space, but also in the sense of time. So the airline runs on a different time than the traveler does. The traveler makes booking decisions in seconds. They need to know about gate changes in minutes, right?

You're kind of running late for your gate. You have 10 minutes before boarding closes. You need to know now if you have to go to gate A23 or A74, right? That's a big difference.

Also, the disruptions affect you now, right? That's the most annoying part of the journey when you have to wait longer. And then the day after, you have a board meeting or you have a wedding to attend, right? And you need to get to that place. That is the timeline of the traveler.

The timeline of the airline runs in decades. For example, for terminal designs, right? When you build a new airport, it takes easily ten years to finalize that airport. We live in Berlin, right? We know how long it took to build our airport. Hopefully that's not the standard, but yeah, that's significant, right? That's the way it is a lot of the time.

We make fleet plans, right? How to utilize the aircraft for years. We order them years in advance, right? We know now what our aircrafts will look like in the next five to ten years because we've We've ordered them already. Where is the room for innovation in that?

And then there's also crew schedules, right, how people are, yeah, moving around from aircraft to aircraft. Those can be designed months in advance, right, but also obviously have a real -time impact when it comes to disruption planning. And this is, you know, the time contingent.

Space Gap: Designing for Averages vs. Individual Experiences

There's also the space contingent, right, where the airport terminal was designed for the masses, right? It's designed for the average traveler. You are one of thousands of people that go through there every day. The assumption is that you being the average traveler can probably walk 600, 700 meters without any issues, but that leaves a lot of room for error as well, right?

If you have mobility limitations, right? If you are old or you are fragile in some other way and need to get from A to B in the same time that the average traveler does, yeah? And that's impacting terminal design, airport design, the entire journey through the airport is the thinking in averages.

What is the usual? Whereas people live in a microclimate, you experience the airport in a very distinct way, in a unique way, different from your counterpart, right?

We see here a family of four. The mom looks kind of stressed with the baby. The kid is like dangling on the phone, like don't wanna forget the child, right? Don't want like a Kevin alone at home scenario where the family takes off without him.

You have the dad who's like somehow operating an iPad, maybe with a mobile app, right? And those are the unique experiences that don't necessarily factor into the planning, but make a huge difference for the traveler.

And that is what we call the resolution gap. And the reason we look at the resolution gap today is because we see AI as a key vehicle that can bridge the gap between the resolution gap, between the unique, the distinct preferences, needs, and experiences of the traveler, and this low resolution information planning spectrums that the airline has. And this is obviously extremely important for us today.

Why AI Matters Now: Shifting Infrastructure and Economics

We all know that AI has made an impact. I don't know if you've seen this chart before. I actually really liked it when I first saw it.

So we're looking at two lines here. The upper line is actually the construction of offices. So the number of offices being constructed in the US, office constructions being one of the, let's say, dominant construction domains.

And then on the lower end, you see the construction of data centers. centers, and apparently in January 2025 was a fantastic time when for the first time the construction of data centers overtook the construction of offices. And what does this tell us about the future of work, right?

It's right in front of you, like our entire infrastructure is changing. It's not about, I'm not saying it's not about going to the office anymore, right? But definitely the future is not around, you know, the infrastructure that we have today. It's about the infrastructure of data centers. centers.

The investment into global data centers by 2030 is projected to be or to reach 3 trillion or more. That is the current GDP of a country like France, right? Just to sort of visualize the perspective, the domain, the scale that we're dealing with, right?

It's the new infrastructure that is emerging and its economic impact is going to be the size of an entire country. country, right?

So we know AI is important. We know AI will upscale the entire airline, right? And we know that it's already very strongly impacting the traveler experience.

It's already strongly impacting the operational side of things. If you talk to a couple of the Lufthansa folks here, they'll tell you about different use cases, different ideas they have for their operations, right?

But what is the middle, right? How do we get to to a sophisticated, a seamless traveler journey utilizing AI while at the same time improving our operations, right?

What is the middle ground? What is the bridge between that?

Eight AI Opportunity Areas Across the Travel Value Chain

And to understand in more detail how we can bridge that gap, we outlined eight opportunity areas.

I won't go into detail for each of them, but just to give you an overview of some of the major realms that are important to the airline in the travel context today.

That is, for example, marketing. I think that's very self -explanatory marketing. marketing, I think being one of the major areas where we see AI making an impact already. Then there's search and book, which I'll talk about a little bit more.

We have integrated production, right, so understanding the production process of the airline, of the product of the airline. We have airline apps.

We have the very operational aspect of revenue management, dynamic pricing, yield management, super, super important. We have the ground experience, which thus far, physical, manual, right, but there's There's a lot of opportunity for digitizing aspects of that.

And there's servicing, which is, again, a realm where we see more and more adoption of AI, chatbots, conversational agents that help your request for the airline. We see the onboard experience, currently not so AI -driven, but maybe that will change. We have some ideas.

And those are eight major opportunity spaces that I think we need to look at very deeply to help the airline get to a more digital future. future. Right.

Deep Dive: Search and Book Is Being Rewritten

I'll put a little bit more focus onto a search and book for now, because I think that's something that all of us can relate to very strongly. So within search and book, this is definitely a focus area for us.

This is a use case mapping that we did in, I think, late 2025, where we took sort of an original look into where we see the first players, the first, yeah, the first standout examples of AI adoption in the industry. you'll see it's not airline specific.

We have Airbnb on here. We have different startups on here like Sherpa, for example. We also have ground transport.

I'll put a focus here on the top right because inspiration planning, booking, and purchase, those are two, let's say, standard categories for the traveler journey in the mind of an airline. But what we see more strongly

than ever is that those two basically are merging. And they are merging because we are no longer searching for travel in the conventional way, right?

From Forms and Filters to Conversational Planning

Basically, the interface for booking your trip hasn't changed in the last 10 years. You'll pull up Booking .com, you'll pull up Expedia, you'll even pull up Lufthansa .com, and the interface is going to look exactly the same, right?

You're putting in where you're coming from, where you're going, when you're going there, how many people are going, right? That is the standard interface, but that is obviously not sufficient anymore, especially in times where social media is now a major,

Social Media as an Inspiration Engine—and the Monetization Challenge

major channel for travel inspiration maybe quick show of hands who recently got a trip idea from social media maybe tick tock maybe instagram anyone following travel influencers okay a couple of people don't be ashamed i also use social media that's fine cool okay so um yeah you know if you believe surveys if you receive if you look at reports like up to 60 to 70 percent of travelers as get inspiration for travel using social media.

The challenge is not necessarily the inspiration angle, but how to monetize that, right? Obviously we can all look through for travel influencers on TikTok, but as an airline to utilize that information to sell more flights is very, very difficult. And this is one of the realms where we do a lot of research into new use cases, into new players that are trying to merge those two aspects.

Emerging Examples: MindTrip, Expedia Trip Matching, and Google Maps

For example, MindTrip is a very interesting player on the scene currently. They provide a booking tool that is conversational, a little bit like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. You can put in your request for an itinerary.

I want to travel to a nostalgic destination. It should be a weekend getaway. It should be a maximum two flight hours away from Berlin.

Those are the new ways in which we can search using conversational interfaces, and MindTrip then recommends an itinerary to you. So far, pretty much the same as ChatGPT or whatever, but maybe with a more specialized repository.

But the, let's say, unique functionality that MindTrip has is that it also allows content creators to upload their itineraries and their recommendations for itineraries on MindTrip.

So they could even, as a travel influencer, if you have a TikTok account and your latest video series was about, I don't know, Bangkok, You can even just upload that imagery onto MindTrip and it will sort of auto -select and recommend, you know, how to structure that as a MindTrip itinerary.

And then when people book this trip through MindTrip, they get a little bit of commission on that as well, right? So that is, I think, one of the interesting ways in which AI, monetization, and social media inspiration have come together.

Another interesting example is Expedia's trip matching on Instagram. If you haven't tried it yet, please try it. I tried it and it was pretty crap, but the idea is cool.

The idea is actually that you're already on Instagram, you're looking at travel influencer content, and then you're just saving that reel and you're sending it to Expedia's Instagram account. So you literally just type in send to Expedia and then Expedia comes up with a suggested itinerary based on that information.

So they basically look at that reel, they say like, oh, this is obviously in Bangkok. I'm seeing, you know, these and these hotspots in here, and then I'm giving you an itinerary that you can then immediately book on Expedia, right? So in theory, also a very smart way to utilize social media as an inspiration channel and turn that into a booking where Expedia earns money.

Not so good for the content creators, though. I don't think they get anything.

And then lastly, another example that I'm actually very keen to try but I think isn't available in Berlin yet is Google Maps that is turning screenshots into itineraries.

So again, sort of a similar thing where you're on social media, you're browsing, you see a reel that you really like, and then you take a screenshot, and then you can upload that into Google Maps into a specific list, and it will find out where it's from, and then you can pin that on Google Maps as well, right?

So also kind of nice if you're looking for something that is around you at that moment that is close to you, right? And those are a couple of the ways in which we see that AI, inspiration, and booking are slowly merging.

I think this will present all of us with, let's say, new opportunities for travel planning, but also for travel booking, thus far underutilized by airlines, by the way, but we're working on it.

Key Takeaways: Discovery Becomes the Transaction

And yeah, the main takeaways here is that discovery is the transaction, right? Even though in traditional terms, we would look at inspiration and discovery as something completely different from the booking, but why should it be, right?

Even though we're acting on social media, even though you can't really book things on on Instagram directly, we have seen very, very interesting outcomes from the launch of TikTok shop, right?

TikTok being a social media, major social media platforms, having sort of a shopping retail functionality attached to it where you see a product on social media on TikTok and you can immediately buy it, right?

And this might be something that we will see more strongly in the travel space as well, right? And then lastly, that's obviously just one level. Social media have been around for a couple of years.

years, we still expect people to search for destinations, right? But maybe it's not about search anymore or maybe it won't be about search in a couple of years. Maybe travelers won't be searching anymore.

Maybe travelers are, you know, going to wait for, you know, the recommendations to come to them. And maybe it's on us as an airline to make that happen, to make sure we know you and

we know your preferences well enough to offer, you know, relevant destinations at the time of your choosing. And I think those are immense opportunity spaces and immense changes that we may see on the horizon.

From SEO Page Rank to “Be the Answer” in an Agent World

And in current terms, it's even hard to define what that would mean. In the search world, you compete for page rank, which page is most active, which page is most popular, which page has the most backlinks, but that doesn't work in an agent world.

So in an agent world, you compete to be the answer, irrespective of where you are in terms of page rank. Right.

Conclusion and Q&A

And with that, I'll close it for today. Feel free to connect. And yeah, please ask away if you have any and all questions.