Source: Iberia
- Spain’s leading airline migrates mission-critical applications to AWS and adopts generative AI to enhance passenger satisfaction, speed innovation, and optimize its global operations
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Iberia Líneas Aéreas de España, S.A., Spain’s flagship airline that operates an extensive flight network across Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia, and Africa, has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to accelerate its digital transformation. By partnering with AWS on a multi-year journey, Iberia is reimagining air travel from the ground up, optimizing operations, increasing reliability and resilience of Iberia’s mission-critical applications, and using artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance passenger satisfaction.
“Our transformation with AWS has fundamentally changed how we operate and serve our customers,” said Gabriel Perdiguero, Chief Financial & Technology Officer at Iberia. “By moving our digital infrastructure to AWS and using AI and data capabilities, we’ve not only achieved unprecedented operational efficiency, but also positioned ourselves to lead the future of air travel through innovation while creating exceptional experiences for our customers. This transformation aligns perfectly with our purpose of generating prosperity by connecting people across the world.”
Increased performance and resiliency
Iberia decommissioned its physical data centers and moved its IT infrastructure to AWS, which included 1,638 servers, 1,235 databases, 572 applications, and Iberia.com. This migration enabled the airline to transform its operational framework with modern microservices architecture using AWS services like Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Aurora Serverless, making it easier to independently scale systems and roll out new features. The company can now release code updates 1,000% faster, reduce development cycle times by 40%, and cut error rates by 38% through comprehensive correlation of metrics, traces, and logs. Iberia has also implemented a new operational model that leverages automation to manage over 200 AWS accounts and over 2,000 AWS resources, enhancing agility and governance. As part of its resilience strategy, Iberia is strategically moving workloads to the AWS Europe (Spain) Region to establish multi-region disaster recovery capabilities and reduce latency for specific workloads.
Enhanced customer experience with AI
Iberia is crafting innovative solutions that enhance the travel experience through AI, powered by AWS technology. The airline is using Amazon Bedrock to improve the passenger experience and increase efficiency in its operations. For example, Iberia has created an AI Travel Assistant, a sophisticated GenAI-powered chatbot integrated into the “Mi Iberia” personal area. This digital companion delivers personalized trip recommendations based on customer profiles and preferences, transforming how travelers plan their journeys. Iberia is weaving generative AI throughout its operations, equipping maintenance engineers with intelligent tools, developing AI-enhanced customer service assistants, and revolutionizing its contact center experience through behavioral analysis, with more than 10 generative AI agents in production.
Operational excellence powered by real-time analytics
Iberia also created a real-time Data Platform on AWS, which includes customer data, commercial data and operations data. The platform powers hundreds of use cases across Iberia’s operations, such as real-time operational reporting, targeted and personalized marketing campaigns, and demand planning, with more than 100 dashboards and 50 AI models used to handle over 20 million daily business process requests. It has become instrumental in enhancing customer experiences and achieving operational excellence. Powered by serverless architecture and Amazon SageMaker, the platform processes almost 2 TB of data daily. Its contribution to company revenue has grown from tens of millions of euros, and is projected to reach hundreds of millions of euros in just over 5 years, demonstrating its crucial role in Iberia’s digital future.
Looking ahead, Iberia also plans to integrate advanced AI capabilities with AWS services into its Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) operations, aiming to transform aircraft maintenance through predictive analytics, automated documentation processing, and AI-assisted technical operations. This modernization will enhance safety, reduce aircraft downtime, and optimize maintenance costs.
“In today’s dynamic aviation landscape, resilience and innovation are paramount,” said Tanuja Randery, Vice President and Managing Director, Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) at AWS. “By leveraging AWS, Iberia Airlines has not only achieved remarkable operational resilience through multi-region capabilities, but it is also pioneering the use of generative AI to transform the passenger experience. Iberia successful deployment of AI-powered solutions across customer service, maintenance, and operations demonstrates how airlines can harness cloud technology to build both a more resilient and innovative future of air travel”.