Riyadh Air hopes to take to the skies in 2026 with an AI advantage. Riyadh and IBM say the fledgling Saudi Arabian carrier will be the world’s first “AI-native” airline. What this means is that AI will be employed in virtually every aspect of the airline experience whether it be as a customer or employee. The AI initiative is a key element in Riyadh Air’s plan to connect flyers to over 100 destinations by 2030, a goal that is part of a broader initiative to transform the Saudi economy by the end of the decade.
As a new airline, Riyadh is able to design operations from the ground up and avoid patchwork legacy systems. IBM brings its technical expertise to orchestrate an ambitious AI vision involving 59 workstreams and more than 60 partners that include the likes of Adobe, Apple, FLYR and Microsoft.
“We had a clear choice—be the last airline built on legacy technology or the first built on the platforms that will define the next decade of aviation,” says Adam Boukadida, Riyadh’s chief financial officer. “With IBM, we’ve stripped out 50 years of legacy in a single stroke.”
“By embedding AI into the very foundation of its operations, Riyadh Air is setting a new blueprint for what it means to build a modern, adaptive enterprise from the ground up,” adds Mohamad Ali, senior vice president, IBM Consulting.
Riyadh Air is a carrier born in the AI era and as such both the aviation industry and customers will be closely monitoring it in a business where delays, cancellations, and other problems are widely reported and customers are wary of AI algorithms used for dynamic pricing that leads to higher fares.
Riyadh says it will double its workforce in the next 12 months. Employee operations will be tightly linked to AI use. Each employee will have a personalized digital workplace powered by AI agents that will provide a single, chat-first entry point.
A key innovation is AI-powered mobile applications that will put employees and passengers on the same digital page. Riyadh is using IBM watsonx Orchestra to build an agentic, AI-based concierge experience that will allow employees to propose next best actions for fast-tracking passengers who are running late. The idea is to use contextual data to anticipate a traveler’s needs and enlist AI-enabled voice bots and agent assist toward that end.
From an operations standpoint, IBM Consulting is implementing an enterprise performance management suite that brings together financial, operational, and commercial data across the organization, automated planning, budgeting, forecasting and analysis to deliver real-time insights and support to aid decision-making. Whether all that includes AI-driven dynamic pricing remains to be seen, but if AI can optimize legroom and keep the in-flight entertainment system operational, then passengers might see it as a worthwhile upgrade.
