With Google Cloud, AirAsia is now a “data first” business that can capture, analyze, and report on rising volumes of data to address complex problems and increase revenue streams. The airline is also using AI-powered chatbots to streamline internal operations and provide a faster, more efficient service.

Google Cloud results

• Increases employee survey response rates by 30% and improved safety, scheduling, and employee orientation
• Enables movement towards a zero trust security model while reducing administration load on IT team
• Increases business agility by deploying faster and more frequently

Industries: Travel & Hospitality

Location: Malaysia

Become a digital airline powered by data and machine learning

AirAsia’s vision is simple: allow everyone to fly. Founded in 2001, the airline and sister company AirAsia X have grown to service 150+ destinations in 25 markets, using 274 aircraft to operate 11,000+ weekly flights from 23 hubs across the region. While the airline is known as a provider of low-cost airfares to locations across Asia, this is only one part of its value proposition. AirAsia also aims to deliver innovative, personalized products and services that meet the needs of each of its passengers.

Technology is key to AirAsia’s success and, with strong support from Group Chief Executive Officer Tony Fernandes, in 2016 the airline began a five-year program to become a data-first business and a digital airline.

“We wanted to better ensure we were using data correctly to become more agile, efficient, and customer oriented,” says Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head at AirAsia.

AirAsia needed technologies and services that could capture, process, analyze, and report on data, while delivering value for money and meeting its speed and availability requirements. The airline also wanted to minimize infrastructure management and system administration demands on its technology team.

Google Cloud the best fit

AirAsia realized only a cloud service could meet its needs and began evaluating the market. The airline then conducted a proof of concept and found Google Cloud was the best fit for its business. It was already familiar with Google Cloud, having deployed Google Workspace collaboration and productivity applications to its workforce in all countries except China. According to Kong Wei, products such as Forms, Docs, Sheets, and Gmail delivered a considerable improvement in collaboration between various departments, as well as streamlining and automating a range of processes.

The business was particularly excited by the potential of the BigQuery analytics data warehouse to power its digital transformation. “We knew data was a big part of making decisions in the future,” says Kong Wei. “So we needed a platform that could scale to meet our growing appetite for it. Google Cloud—in particular BigQuery—was ideal for this task.”

The AirAsia technology team was impressed by the ease and flexibility with which it could extract, transform, and load customer data from its systems, websites, and mobile applications into BigQuery for analysis. Data, reports, and dashboards were delivered and visualized through Looker Studio.

BigQuery also scaled seamlessly to support data growth and, as a managed service, required minimal administration from the airline’s technology team. “In addition, with BigQuery, we could process queries and requests much faster than previously and tackle more complex problems,” says Kong Wei. “As a result, we could be more innovative about realizing opportunities,” he adds, citing the benefits of being able to view and understand historical measures of booking curves—a measure of how long it took customers to book before a flight. This improves the airline’s ability to manage revenues.

A broad ecosystem

BigQuery and Looker Studio are just two components of a broad ecosystem—powered largely by Google Cloud services—deployed by AirAsia. Pub/Sub provides a scalable message queue that enables AirAsia developers to integrate systems hosted on Google Cloud or externally. Apache Airflow enables the business to create, schedule, and monitor workflows, while Cloud Composer manages the dependencies of PHP and related libraries. App Engine allows AirAsia personnel to develop and host web applications. “Thanks to App Engine, we’ve easily been able to create new applications, services, and APIs powered by the data we have been collecting,” says Kong Wei.

AirAsia is also running the middleware for its APIs in a managed Google Kubernetes Engine environment for increased scalability, resource optimization, and reliability, while Cloud Storage provides storage for data from a range of systems and sources. Dataflow enables the business to transform and process data in stream and batch modes from its website search page as customers look for flights.

Faster deployment and testing

The stability of Google Cloud service means AirAsia has a reliable base from which to launch new products and features. “If we have consistent reliability from our core systems—and Google Cloud incorporates monitoring tools such Cloud Monitoring that enable us to identify issues quickly—developers and product engineers can focus on turning ideas into reality,” says Kong Wei. “With a minimal number of people involved, we can very quickly transform an idea or thought process into a deliverable. Prior to Google Cloud, bringing those ideas to fruition would have been impossible.”

Robust security

AirAsia is also relying on Security Health Analytics, a product that integrates with Security Command Center, to identify misconfigurations and compliance violations in its Google Cloud resources and take action. Security Health Analytics ensures the airline’s budgets go to keeping customers’ travel costs low rather than recovering from security breaches.

The product enables AirAsia to check that resources are configured properly and are compliant with CIS benchmarks as its critical workloads run in Google Kubernetes Engine and App Engine.

“Being able to go to the new Security Health Analytics dashboard eliminates the guesswork of what we have running and if it is secure,” says Muhammad Faeez Bin Azmi, Information Security and Automation Solution Architect. “Now anyone on our team, even non-security professionals, can go to this dashboard and see a list of the misconfigured assets and compliance violations across all of our Google Cloud resources. We can also see the severity of misconfigurations, which helps us prioritize our response.”

“Security Health Analytics has really helped us reduce the amount of time we spend trying to figure out what’s wrong with our resources. It’s allowed us to use our time more effectively to identify and resolve more security issues than we could before.”

A new identity solution

AirAsia had also used a legacy on-premises directory for many years. However, as the company grew and expanded to new markets and regions, it had to manage multiple servers across a number of on-premises data centers and the public cloud, which proved costly and time-consuming.

Its Allstars—the airline’s name for its employees—needed to easily access a number of legacy on-premises apps in addition to a growing number of SaaS apps. As a business, it also needed a more seamless integration between its HR system of record and its identity solution for user provisioning and life cycle management. Solving these challenges with its existing on-premises directory was simply not feasible.

AirAsia brought up its identity concerns with the Google Cloud team, and after a number of conversations, decided to deploy Cloud Identity, Google’s cloud-based Identity and Access Management solution, to help address the identity challenges it was facing.

The airline chose Cloud Identity for a number of reasons—first, it was eager to move to the cloud as quickly as possible. Moving identity management to the cloud was a key enabler of this and the airline’s broader digital transformation. Managing identities from the cloud also enabled the airline to have a single identity and set of credentials for each employee, which they could use to access all the applications they need to be productive, both in the cloud and on-premises.

In addition, deploying Cloud Identity was a key step towards enabling the zero trust security model, which the airline felt was the best approach to strengthen its security posture and fight modern threats. Cloud Identity also integrated seamlessly with its existing technologies, which include not only Google Cloud products like Google Workspace and Chrome OS but also third-party tools like Citrix, Papercut, and others.

And finally, Cloud Identity offered significant cost and resource savings. With Cloud Identity in place, AirAsia’s IT department could spend less time worrying about managing multiple on-premises directory servers and and could instead focus on delivering value to Allstar employees.

Machine learning employed to increase ancillary revenue

In March 2018, AirAsia established the groundwork to use machine learning to optimize pricing for a range of services and began by using AI Platform to sort and predict demand for ancillary services such as baggage, seats, and meals. “By using AI Platform, we can sort based on data about history to predict the future,” says Kong Wei.

Dialogflow in wide use

With Google Cloud well established within the business, AirAsia is using Dialogflow, a voice and conversational interface development suite (and one of the core components of Contact Center AI) that enables businesses to create engaging AI powered voice- and text-based interfaces such as chatbots and voice apps—to streamline operations and reduce costs

“Tony Fernandes, our Group Chief Executive Officer, motivated us to create a range of metrics that would enable us to respond more quickly and efficiently to customers,” says Yuashini Vellasamy, Product Manager at AirAsia.

This resulted in the initial deployment of Dialogflow in AirAsia’s operational areas, from crew scheduling to internal business tasks.

With Dialogflow, AirAsia is able to provide pilots, crew, catering, and other teams with flight times, capacity and any other relevant information about their assignments. Another bot accepts medical certificates and updates from pilots and crew members unable to make rostered assignments and switches those assignments to other pilots and crews. “This improves our on-time performance and operational efficiency, as we are able to optimize the creation of crew schedules,” says Vellasamy.

AirAsia also uses Dialogflow to power a “safety bot” for airport ground staff. “We tried a lot of tools to encourage staff to advise us when they saw a safety issue—but employee usage was low,” says Vellasamy. “However, when we set up the safety bot, which asks users just four questions about an issue they have observed, we saw an increase in employee interaction, which helps ensure proper safety measures.

Beyond crew optimization and overall safety, AirAsia’s HR department in Asia uses a Dialogflow-powered bot to run a post-orientation engagement program for new employees. The bot follows up with employees about issues from parking to AirAsia’s onboarding buddy program, saving HR employees time from scheduling one-on-one meetings. Dialogflow also powered an employee satisfaction survey of 3,000 team members, resulting in a 30% increase in response rate compared to the previous year.

One of Dialogflow’s benefits is its language coverage, which the airline’s marketing team uses to target customers and prospects across a region with diverse languages and cultures. “For weekly campaigns and promotions, our sales and marketing teams simply update the campaign materials and the changes are reflected automatically in Dialogflow and consequently to users,” says Vellasamy. “This enables us to quickly scale and reach our customers globally.”

An upward trajectory

AirAsia is poised to reap further benefits from Google Cloud as its deployment matures. “On the data side, we’re more advanced, while on the application and programming side we have a long way to go,” says Kong Wei. “We’re on a trajectory upwards—we’re looking at a lot of new ideas and how to embrace and deploy them so we can further our data-first and digital airline agendas.”

Over the last year, COVID-19 presented unforeseen challenges for practically every type of business and organization—including schools, colleges, and universities. For educational institutions, the pandemic was an unapologetic agent of acceleration, shifting one billion learners from in-person to online learning within two months. 

The rapid transition to online learning exposed many schools’ lack of readiness for the new online learning environment. It also widened the learning equity gap for students, with fewer than 40% of students from low-income families having access to the tools required for remote learning.

For those who do have online access, today’s students expect everything from engaging and collaborative digital learning experiences to skills-based training for their roles in the future workforce. Expectations are also high for 24×7 multi-channel tech support across all learning devices, applications, and platforms.  

In these remarkable times, education technology companies have an important role to play in supporting academic institutions and students. Indeed, this is already happening, as the EdTech (Educational Technology) market is nearly tripling, with total global expenditures expected to reach $404 billion by 2025. However, the success of these EdTech companies depends on their performance in a number of areas, including:

• Content and products: How quickly can they generate new content and react to learner needs with new products to additional markets for broader adoption?
• Personalization: How effectively can they leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to provide a personalized experience to all types of learners?
• Trust and security: How trusted and secure are their services when educational organizations are suffering the highest number of data breaches since 2005?

Here are a few examples of how EdTech companies are successfully using AI and analytics to capture this opportunity and transform their businesses:

• Build better products: iSchoolConnect is an online platform that lets students explore schools, courses, and countries where they might study, and makes higher education admissions accessible to students around the globe. The company leverages AI services to help educational institutions optimize their academic operations by accelerating admission processing by greater than 90%, while saving significant costs.
• Launch in new markets faster: Classroom creativity tools provider Book Creator uses AI APIs to enhance accessibility and improve the learner experience. “The broad suite of intelligent APIs enables us to deliver richer experiences, faster and more easily, without having to be experts in machine learning, drawing recognition, map embeds, or other areas,” says VP of engineering Thom Leggett.
• Scale businesses securely: Using DevOps and CDN [content delivery network] services, Chrome browser recording extension creator Screencastify was able to support eight times growth in users overnight amid the COVID-19 pandemic, while maintaining consistent total cost of ownership. These technologies helped the company rapidly scale operations in response to the overnight increase in demand from consumers and assure student data privacy and security on a budget. “We know this is just the beginning, as more educators rely on technology to deliver richer, more interactive curricula to students,” says CEO James Francis. 
• Provide personalized learning and support: Smart analytics and AI can provide personalized support and recommendations for students, forecast demand, and predict shifts in learners’ preferences. Online learning platform Mindvalley uses cloud-based tools to understand and make decisions based on user activity and leverage machine learning to predict behavior. 

Google Cloud is partnering with many of these leading EdTech companies, as well as industry-leading consortiums like Ed-Fi and Unizin, to standardize educational common data models and best practices for more agile and cost-effective integration of EdTech into existing environments.

The education landscape is changing rapidly, and EdTech has a major role to play as institutions adapt to the massive shift in learners’ preferences and expectations. We’re committed to empowering EdTech companies with the tools and services they need to help expand learning for everyone, anywhere. 

Watch our Spotlight session with EdTechX to learn more.

Editor’s note: In honor of Mother’s Day, we look at how 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. migrated to Google Cloud as part of its digital transformation to quickly deploy seamless and convenient customer experiences across multiple brands on Mother’s Day and every day. 

As a leading provider of gifts designed to help customers express, connect, and celebrate,  1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. has embraced cloud technologies to grow and transform its business through constant innovation. As part of our digital transformation, we recently completed the migration of our ecommerce platform and other services to Google Cloud. We’ve transitioned from a monolithic to a microservices platform, moved many workloads from our on-premises data centers to our Google Cloud environment, and scaled both horizontally and vertically. 

Since our migration, we’ve developed efficient processes to launch new brands, improved the customer experience across all brands, and seen significantly increased site traffic. 

Nurturing a more delightful customer journey

Customer delight is at the core of everything we do. Whether it be with a flower bouquet, a sweet treat, or a personalized keepsake, our mission is to deliver smiles. With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all been challenged to find unique and safe ways to continue honoring the special connections in our lives and celebrating occasions with loved ones. Our customers have adapted by doing things such as sending gifts to isolated loved ones, sharing the same meal together virtually, or using video to engage with others through group activities like flower arranging and building charcuterie boards. 

The customer experience is a top priority for us, and we constantly look for innovative ways to enhance the customer journey across our ecommerce platform of more than a dozen brands. As a result, we’ve continued to see a rise in demand as customers enjoy the ease and convenience of our site and discover our full family of brands. 

Migrating to a cloud-first mindset

As we’ve continued to innovate and iterate on the customer experience, we knew we wanted to evolve our platform. We wanted to shift to a microservices platform, which would allow our team the opportunity to release updates to our site more often and set up the right continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices. 

Working with Google Cloud, we were able to move our ecommerce platform to the cloud and standardize our site and brand deployment by building one release that could then be repeated across all of our brands. We built everything in a modular fashion, including microservices and      code libraries, so that sites could be easily constructed and replicated for each brand. And because of this, we were able to launch Shari’s Berries extremely quickly after we acquired the brand in 2019.   

Moving our platform to a completely homegrown solution of microservices was a daunting task. But our team handled it beautifully through load-testing, stress-testing, and building new monitoring tools. And with Google Cloud supporting us all along the way, managing the migration process was simple and easy from start to finish. 

Arranging a better bouquet of services

Currently, we’ve migrated every customer-facing touchpoint for all of our brands to Google Cloud—whether it’s on the web or mobile, our AI bots, or our chat interfaces. 

• We run on Google Kubernetes Engine and Istio.
• We have nearly 200 microservices built to help power our entire ecommerce stack across several cloud services running on Google Cloud. 
• We’re utilizing BigQuery for our offline intelligence.

Results are coming up roses

Our new stack on Google Cloud has benefits for both us and our customers. We moved from a session-based to a token-based system, which provides enhanced security as well as a consistent, convenient experience across all our brands. Using service workers and a single-page app, we are able to download all the relevant site content to the browser in under two seconds to create an instant-click experience for each and every customer. We also use Google Analytics to measure our user interactions and provide personalized results to each customer. Our hope is that with this new system, we can learn from customer behavior to offer gift givers a more personalized shopping experience during each visit. 

The benefits of our new tech stack have not only helped us enhance the solutions we offer to customers today, they’ve also enabled us to offer new ones at lightning speed. With our legacy system, we used to release new code once a week or once a month. Now, even during our peak periods, we’re able to release 10 to 15 times a day and can deploy and pivot quickly to create new microservices and microsites on the fly—often without having to touch any code. 

Efficiencies abound     

The benefits of moving our platform to Google Cloud have extended to our internal teams as well. Before the migration, we had only two environments for developing and testing, which made it time-consuming to test updates before they went into production. Now with Google Cloud, we have several different journey teams—which are made up of developers, product owners, and technical owners—all working in several different environments, solving problems, and creating new solutions together. 

Everyone is now empowered to be self-sufficient, developing and releasing microservices on their own when they’re ready. This has given our developers more time to take part in continued development and learning opportunities. For example, we offer lunch-and-learn sessions as well as other resources for everyone to take advantage of so they can continue to learn and refine their skills.

Planting the seeds for future growth

As we look to the future and think about how we help our customers express, connect, and celebrate, we’ll continue to collaborate across teams to deliver solutions that spread smiles. Specifically, we’re exploring additional use of AI to help us better serve our customers across all our brands. 

We’ve enjoyed the ongoing support we’ve received from the Google Cloud team as they help us build new solutions and design a road map for the future. Their support has helped the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. team to realize the power of the cloud and bring the very best experience to our customers.

Learn more about 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., or check out our recent blog about cloud migration for the real world.