Delta gives AI a seat at the top table

Recently, United’s CEO argued that the industry is fooling itself with broad AI. Delta Air Lines‘ answer arrived months before he said it, and it already has a seat on the leadership committee.

In January, Delta created a new role, the Chief Digital & Technology Officer, and gave it to Amala Duggirala, hired from USAA, where she spent four years as EVP and CIO leading enterprise-wide AI adoption: roughly 38,000 employees trained, over 200 AI products shipped. She succeeds Rahul Samant, Delta’s CIO for a decade, who retired after steering the airline through, among other things, the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage that grounded flights worldwide. The title change is the real signal here: CIO becomes Chief Digital & Technology Officer, folding enterprise IT and digital product into one seat reporting straight to Ed Bastian.

Duggirala wasted no time setting out her thesis. Days into the job, in an essay titled “Technology Is the Easy Part, and Culture Is the Hard Part,” she argued the real constraint on AI is its adoption: “The technology is the vehicle, but culture is the engine.” Her prescription: operationalise AI rather than run it as a perpetual pilot; train leadership before the rest of the organisation; and redesign whole processes instead of automating individual tasks.

Under her watch, Delta Concierge, the generative AI travel assistant, reached 100% of SkyMiles members, and an AI-driven routing pilot in Atlanta cut baggage transfer times by 30%.
She is also the fifth aviation executive hired in under a year from outside the industry for a marketing, loyalty, or technology mandate: Southwest’s Chief Digital & Marketing Officer came from Hilton, Virgin Atlantic’s from YOOX-NET-A-PORTER, United’s MileagePlus lead from Apple, JSX’s Chief Commercial Officer from Topgolf. Airlines are buying people who have already run adoption at scale elsewhere.

Two of the largest US carriers and two opposite bets on the same technology, in the same week: is it a genuine strategic split, or just two CEOs picking the story that best fits where their airline already needs to win?