British airline easyJet has announced a new AI control centre that will manage nearly 500,000 flights annually. 

The Integrated Control Centre (ICC) is in Luton and will manage easyJet’s 2,000 daily flights. 

The control centre team will have access to easyJet’s new GenAI tool, Jetstream, which will provide instant access to the airline’s policies, procedures and operational issue information. 

Johan Lundgren, easyJet’s CEO, said that the company would continue to invest into AI. 

“[AI] is already hard at work in the air and on the ground helping us predict exactly what food and drink we need for certain routes while minimising food waste, aiding predictive maintenance decisions and helping us to ensure we have the right aircraft on the right routes to best match demand,” he said. 

More than 250 route planners and crewing teams will work in the ICC managing over 340 easyJet aircraft using Jetstream. 

EasyJet’s director of network control, Gill Baudot, explained that GenAI could help speed up decision-making processes, creating a faster way to solve operational issues. 

“Each and every day my whole team are responsible for, and entirely focused on, safely getting more than a quarter of a million passengers to their destinations, navigating the many and varied challenges that Europe’s busy and complex airspace can bring,” she said. 

“Providing our people with generative AI solutions at their fingertips helps to speed up decision making to solve operational issues as they occur and we can see many ways to further build on the progress we have already made and enhance this in the near future,” she added. 

Research and analysis company GlobalData forecast the total AI market will be worth more than $1.04trn by 2030, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 39% from 2023. 

In its 2024 tech sentiment survey, nearly 20% of businesses reported that they already had a high adoption rate of AI in their workflows.