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.

“We knew data was a big part of making decisions in the future. 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.”

—Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head, AirAsia

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 G Suite 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.”

“With BigQuery, we could process queries and requests much faster than previously and tackle more complex problems.”

—Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head, AirAsia

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 Google Data 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 Data 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.

“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.”

—Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head, AirAsia

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 G Suite 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.”

Education is about more than just imparting information. For the Geneva Business School (GBS), education is about teaching the necessary skills to adapt, survive, and thrive in the world after pupils have graduated. With a diverse, international student body spread out over five campuses, the school prides itself on fostering leadership, communication, and productivity skills as well as academic achievement. In 2016, GBS began searching for ways to help its students work together and improve communication. To do that, it turned to Google Workspace for Education.

“We wanted our content stored in a digital environment where the students could collaborate on projects even when working remotely,” says Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director at Geneva Business School. “For us the solution was Google Workspace.”

Improving collaboration, increasing accountability

Prior to 2016, GBS’ online course components were designed to be worked on individually. Students could download course materials from extranet sites to work offline on traditional word processing and spreadsheet software. If they were working together, they had to be physically in the same room or would communicate over email. GBS places a strong emphasis on collaborative work, but in such a fragmented setup, it could be hard for professors to work out exactly who had contributed what in each group.

“In just a few clicks you can get a really good picture of the whole class. Whenever we tried this before Google Classroom, we would enter the grades manually and it took forever.”

Sabrina Espasandin, Instructional Designer and Google Trainer, Geneva Business School

For GBS, the solution came from its Barcelona campus, which has a reputation as something of an innovation hub, says Sabrina Espasandin, Instructional Designer and Google Trainer at the school. “It’s smaller than the main campus in Switzerland so there’s more scope for experimenting with new technologies,” she says. GBS wanted to do more than just upgrade its email. The objective was to build an entire online platform enabling students, faculty, and staff to not only communicate with each other, but also to use it as a productivity platform for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

Connecting students and professors with Google Classroom

After evaluating its options, the Barcelona campus chose to implement Google Workspace for Education in early 2016, largely because of the widespread adoption of Google tools by students in their personal lives. “Most of our students were very familiar with Google tools and how Google works,” says Carlos. “It made the transition much easier for them.” With such a radical change, GBS also made sure to provide adequate training for everybody to help them overcome any issues that might arise during the transition. “There was a little pushback from people who had been using the same tools for a long time,” says Sabrina. “But once they saw for themselves the benefits of the new system, we turned sceptics into believers.”

The core of the new system was Google Classroom, a single, online destination where teachers and students could quickly and easily interact with each other no matter where they were. Gmail replaced the traditional email system, easing the load on the campus servers. Live editing in Docs, Sheets, and Slides meant that students could work on projects and presentations at the same time without having to email multiple versions, which could get buried in long threads.

“It’s changed the whole way we work. Students would post questions online, and other students would answer them before the teacher got there. It means the knowledge comes from the class, not just from the professor.” –

Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director, Geneva Business School

The faculty used Sites as an opportunity to update their course materials from static slideshows that had to be downloaded for offline viewing, into animated, interactive pages online. Meanwhile, Forms proved itself useful as a way for professors to setup quizzes online and, in conjunction with Google Classroom, to help automate the marking process and quickly analyze results.

A new platform, a new way of working

The online hub that GBS built in Barcelona with Google Classroom and Google Workspace was very quickly seen as a success. So much so, that within six months, the school rolled out Google Workspace to all of its other campuses. As of Q3 2018, GBS has activated more than 2,300 user accounts. The students benefit from instant communication, frictionless collaboration, and the ability to work on projects outside the classroom. It also means they are in a better position to answer each other’s questions without having to wait for a response from their teacher.

Meanwhile, GBS’ teachers no longer have to deal with an extranet that required them to upload all their own content in an overly complicated way or spend hours bulk-creating new email addresses at the start of each year. “The time saved in administrative tasks has been massive,” says Sabrina. “User creation is a breeze compared to the past.” In addition, the faculty found a new efficiency with rote tasks, such as grading analysis, which allowed them to spend more time focusing on students and assessing their specific needs.

“In just a few clicks you can get a really good picture of the whole class,” says Sabrina. “Whenever we tried this before Google Classroom, we would enter the grades manually and it took forever.”

“We’ve built a very personalized online platform designed to engage students and reduce dropout rates. With Google, we hope to bring the collaborative spirit we have in our normal classes to our online classrooms.” –

Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director, Geneva Business School

Meanwhile, Professors have found that, despite fears of an always-online culture, the collaborative nature of the new platform empowers students to help each other instead of just relying on help from the faculty.

“It’s changed the whole way we work,” says Carlos. “Students would post questions online, and other students would answer them before the teacher got there. It means the knowledge comes from the class, not just from the professor.”

With all of GBS migrated to Google Workspace, the search is on for the next leap forward. The school is currently working hard to provide some of its courses entirely online, for students who wish to work remotely but still benefit from GBS’ superior teaching and strong reputation. The content for the new modules will be hosted on Sites, while Google Classroom will serve as a central hub for teacher-student communication. GBS is working to personalize the modules for teachers and students alike. For example, every teacher will have access to a classroom roster that provides quick links to students’ digital portfolios, also hosted on a Google Site.

Building on the knowledge it has acquired in the last two years with various Google tools, the school is trying to make online learning more effective, as well as develop more in-depth measurements of student growth and progression. As it becomes more comfortable with Google Workspace and Google Classroom, GBS can look forward to exploring its new metrics with tools such as Google Data Studio.

“We’ve built a very personalized online platform designed to engage students and reduce dropout rates,” says Carlos. “With Google, we hope to bring the collaborative spirit we have in our normal classes to our online classrooms.”

The benefits of APIs are becoming more clear in an ever-evolving tech landscape, yet ITDMs still struggle to convince executives and investors to buy into an API-first strategy. Here’s a look at the importance of APIs in a changing world, and how ITDMs can make the business case in order to secure the best API strategy for their organization.

According to Google Cloud’s new “State of the API Economy 2021” report, a majority of IT decision-makers view application programming interfaces, or APIs, as essential ingredients in improved customers experiences, expanded partner engagement, accelerated innovation, and other demands of today’s business environment. This is encouraging: APIs are how software talks to other software, and since much of digital transformation involves combining disparate data and functionality into rich user experiences and process automations, APIs are an essential ingredient in modern business strategies. 

What’s less encouraging: the research surveys primarily IT professionals, not business leaders. It’s clear that IT people see the benefits of APIs in the ever-changing tech landscape, but we still hear regular concerns from these same people that they have trouble convincing executives and investors to buy into an API-first strategy. In this article, we’ll look into why they are having these difficulties and some proven ways to successfully position an API strategy not just as a technological solution, but also as a business requirement.

The importance of APIs in a changing world

The rise of APIs has been heavily influenced by the introduction of disruptive new business models and evolving customer preferences that traditional technologies are not positioned to quickly and efficiently address. 

For example, traditionally, if your business sold tickets to events, it would build physical ticket booths and maybe a website or first-party mobile app. Today, tickets in many cases aren’t so much a physical thing presented to an usher as a digital code that an usher scans. Likewise, tickets are less-often purchased in person as opposed to online, and reliance on a first-party website can be unnecessarily restrictive. It places the burden on the business to attract customers, whereas surfacing organically in social media, search engine results, and other digital experiences lets the business meet customers where they’re already assembled. 

Moreover, as COVID-19 continues to disrupt events throughout the world, many ticket sellers—and most organizations, for that matter—have pivoted to digital-first business interactions as a matter of necessity. All of these changes in the business model, and all of the interacting systems and functionality that underpin them, rely on communication among APIs. 

Similarly, today’s banks cannot grow by simply building more branches or hiring more tellers. Instead, they need to make financial information and functionality available when and where customers require it, whether that means via an ATM, a first-party app, or within some other digital experience. Many banks also need to do more than just present this functionality, as customers are increasingly interested in the analytics and insights their spending patterns can yield. Again, all of these interactions—from customers making a purchase within an app to banks applying machine learning in order to offer customers financial insights—are enabled by APIs.     

Related: The “State of API Economy 2021” report describes how digital transformation initiatives evolved throughout 2020, as well as where they’re headed in the years to come. Download for free.

When guidance meets resistance

These examples do not illustrate technology that updates the status quo, but rather technology that unlocks business opportunities that transcend the status quo—and that help businesses to thrive even as the status quo fades into irrelevance and obsolescence. APIs are thus not just an IT topic but also important business enablers that should be understood by everyone involved with the enterprise’s investments, from internal stakeholders approving business strategies to external shareholders trying to assess an organization’s trajectory. 

The challenge for investor relations is to convey these financial and operational benefits in a way that clearly communicates the need for a new business model rather than refinements to the existing models. It’s essential that IT professionals understand APIs, but it’s also essential for business leaders to understand them too.

This is even trickier given that arguments for API investments are often based on future potential, while arguments for more conservative alternatives are based on past success. 

At a high level, the API value proposition is clear: In the past, valuable functionality and data have been encased in systems and applications, making them difficult to scale or leverage for new, evolving use cases. In contrast, APIs make functionality and data infinitely reusable, infinitely scalable, and modular such that APIs can easily be combined for new uses. All of this accrues to richer user experiences and more flexibility than ever for companies to monetize their digital assets, share them with partners, or combine them with assets from third parties. 

It’s essential that IT professionals understand APIs, but it’s also essential for business leaders to understand them too.

But investors typically want as much information as possible because their decisions can affect not just productivity and output, but company stock prices and potential future growth. High-level arguments may not be persuasive. The deeper assurances investors crave would normally come from guidance.

Guidance in this context refers to insights based on growth forecasts and customer adoption, but this can be difficult early in market entry. Robust forecasting processes need to be developed to demonstrate the efficacy and value of the API economy, which can be hard to predict: whereas APIs are well understood in some sectors, and especially among digital natives, they are in the early stages of the growth rate in other verticals, making it challenging to forecast developer adoption of a given API. And since there is a shortage of information, trying to use traditional guidance comes with a risk of being wrong and thus of little value to investors.

Related: Set your 2021 API resolutions with these top 2020 posts.

How to deliver a more useful value proposition

While guidance may be premature during the early stages of market entry, investor relations teams still need to convey the full value of an enterprise to investors. To do this, they need a value proposition that emphasizes the intrinsic value of the investment while reinforcing the benefits that can best drive business and stock growth. Considering how large an investment of time, effort, and money transitioning to an API economy can be, it is vital to convey that the benefits are substantial.

A solid value proposition should demonstrate maximum returns, and while this shouldn’t include far-fetched or unobtainable claims, it can include reasonable aspirational visions alongside statistical insights. To craft these aspirational narratives, investor relations teams should look to their organization’s existing business needs and challenges, and then demonstrate how APIs can benefit the organization in these areas. Here are some options that speak to a number of common business requirements:

• Sales channel: API investments are reusable, improve speed to market, enable automated processes and partner onboarding, and can uncover unanticipated opportunities.
• Cost: Businesses can reduce operational costs by using and reusing APIs for innovation and business development, and by using the services native to your partner’s digital surface, you can further reduce innovation costs and risks.
• Earnings: API-enabled digital ecosystems unlock a variety of partner services that leverage the business’s shared data to drive new customer acquisition, new market positions, new transaction volumes, and direct API monetization.
• Risk mitigation: By investing in a credible API, businesses can mitigate downside risks that traditional enterprises can face from market disruptors, industry-wide shifts to digital tools, and inabilities to ingest and analyze growing data sources.
• Intellectual property: Unlike project-driven innovation and customized, point-to-point integration that traps enterprise knowledge in small teams and divisional silos, APIs are reusable and modular, breaking down silos and encouraging intra-organizational collaboration.
• Speed to market: The efficient, repeatable API interface informs improvements to the fulfillment process with consistent access to data from across the organization, which drives solutions that more quickly and efficiently meet customer needs.
• Ethics: APIs offer the flexibility and economical advantages that give organizations the capacity to focus on their brand’s ethical “reason for being” beyond profitability by serving economically marginal and underserved market segments.
• Customer credibility: Organizations can deliver the extended, connected digital experiences that customers expect with the tools and flexibility included with API products.
• Employee retention: Businesses can avoid losing key employees by updating their legacy technologies with APIs, giving employees the opportunity to enhance their skills with modern technologies.
• Corporate strategy: Enterprises that use APIs’ reusable, modular structure and tools are more capable of adapting to rapid structural shifts in customer demand patterns and sectoral changes in the economy.

Whichever of these business challenges a team speaks to, it is imperative that they demonstrate the benefits of APIs, and that once they’ve determined the angle they intend to use, they keep their message consistent. While we’ve seen a number of viable ways to position APIs as a winning strategy, switching among them could make the presentation—and APIs in general—seem insubstantial and unreliable. 

This is why it’s key to decide on the most relevant business concerns, and once you’ve tailored your presentation, to make sure that you have message alignment, including buy-in and support from C-level executives. With a strong pitch built around solving existing business concerns and solidarity from relevant stakeholders, you can go into your investor meeting with the confidence to secure the best API strategy for your organization.

Strengthen your pitch with additional insights. Here are five key trends in 2021 for API-first digital transformation.

About the Author: Paul Rohan is a researcher on Open Banking and a Google Cloud solutions consultant. Paul works with banking C-Suites that are examining the impact of the Platform Economy and Digital Ecosystems on financial services industry growth, market structures and governance. Paul is the author of “PSD2 in Plain English” and “Open Banking Strategy Formation”.