Lufthansa Technik is partnering up with Microsoft to further the use of artificial intelligence (AI), in order to optimise maintenance operations.
AI will be used to solve tasks autonomously, with this collaboration being a part of Lufthansa Technik's initiative to drive the digitisation of its core operational processes.
Lufthansa Technik CFO William Willms said the company is “excited” about the collaboration with Microsoft. Willms is also responsible for the company's IT department.
In a LinkedIn post, he said: “It is my core belief that AI will become the foundational layer of any company's ecosystem.”
He noted that this new partnership will allow Lufthansa Technik to use AI to “solve highly complex challenges" and “improve operations.”
“In our industry, we deal with vast amounts of unstructured data, such as text in work instructions or images of damages to aircraft parts or reliability data from our shop floors,” continued Willms in his post. “All this data is often interdependent or needs to be processed in a logical order. And all of this is done by our clever minds. It’s obvious that no one can make full use of it, simply because of the incredible amount of data.”
He said that AI will be the “gamechanger” that will fully unlock the potential for this data.
The initiative includes over 50 context-sensitive AI use cases based on Microsoft Azure AI Services and the Microsoft Azure cloud.