Behold AI - the two letters attached to any new project to drive a stock price higher without having to explain why. Already, the public is picking up on the overuse of the word, with an estimated 95% of AI projects failing.

We’ve been working with AI models for almost 20 years - well before they were even called AI models. We are certainly not experts on AI, but we can provide some context. Sometimes — roughly 5%, according to the MIT report — these projects succeed.

Take Delta Air Lines, for example. The airline’s Q2 2025 earnings call shook some people in the industry. It should have. After several years of being the unannounced U.S. airline partner for A.I. firm Fetcherr, Delta emerged. The results were impressive. How do we know? Glenn Hauenstein said as much: “We like what we see. We like it a lot…”

What surprised us wasn’t that Delta was using this model — it was that Delta announced they were. This prompted a seemingly endless stream of questions from our subscribers about what is happening at Delta and Fetcherr.

The answer is both simultaneously simple and complex. Simple in that the public fears of the new model of it being able to read browsing history or even see how much you have in your checking account are hilariously absurd. Yet, of course, it is a complex model. How complex? 15 pages complex.

In response to the dozens of emails we’ve received regarding AI in aviation and its implications, we've created an AI primer, of sorts.

It was supposed to be a newsletter. Things got a bit out of hand.

We’ve written a whitepaper on what is happening with Delta’s new integration of Fetcherr’s AI model. It serves as an oversimplified primer on AI in commercial aviation, written for those who have questions about what it actually means to deploy a model like this, and why it’s both not really new and a very big deal at the same time.

The intention is to take you from zero to “oh, so it’s not reading my private information in an attempt to rise up and take over the world.”

Well… not yet, anyway.

But this is a big deal — at least it can be. And while airline revenue management departments have been at the forefront of these types of AI models for decades, the advantages aren’t limited to that one department.

So, while AI remains a massive industry of diverse models with seemingly endless applications, we focus on this one: An oversimplified look at artificial Intelligence from the 1800s to 2025, and why this latest news from Delta is saying the quiet part out loud.

The whitepaper is free and available to all to download through our new research library.

Pricing at the Speed of Data: The New Airline AI Arms Race

Research published this week

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