Rajeev: Positive. I believe as of late none of those conversations could be full with out speaking about AI and gen AI. We began this early exploratory part early into the sport, particularly on this a part of the world. However for us, the bottom line is approaching this primarily based on the shopper’s ache factors and enterprise wants after which we work backward to determine what sort of AI is greatest appropriate or related to us. In Cathay, at the moment, we concentrate on three essential sorts of AI. One is after all conversational AI. Basically, it’s a type of an inside and exterior chatbot. Our chatbot, we name it Vera, serves prospects immediately and might deal with about 50% of the inquiries efficiently. And nearly two weeks again, we upgraded the LLM with a brand new mannequin, the chatbot with a brand new mannequin, which is ready to be extra environment friendly and way more responsive when it comes to the human work. In order that’s one a part of the AI that we closely invested on.
Second is RPA, or robotic course of automation, particularly what you are seeing is through the pandemic and post-Covid period, there’s restricted assets out there, particularly in Hong Kong and throughout our provide chain. So RPA or the robotic processes helps to automate mundane repetitive duties, which does not solely fill the useful resource hole, however it additionally immediately enhances the worker expertise. And to this point in Cathay, we’ve got a few hundred bots in manufacturing serving varied enterprise models, serving roughly 30,000 hours yearly of human exercise. So that is the second half.
The third one is round ML and it is the gen AI. So like our digital crew or the info science crew has developed about 70-plus ML fashions in Cathay that turned the group information into insights or actionable objects. These fashions assist us to make a greater determination. For instance, what meals to be loaded into the plane and particular routes, when it comes to what amount and how much product presents we promote to prospects, and together with the fare loading and the pricing of our passenger in addition to a cargo bay area. There’s quite a lot of exploration that’s being performed on this area as properly. And a few examples I may relate is in case you ever occur to come back to Hong Kong, subsequent time on the airport, you may hear the general public announcement system and that’s additionally AI-powered lately. Prior to now, our employees used to manually make these bulletins and now it has been moved away and has been moved into AI-powered voice know-how in order that we could possibly be constant in our announcement.
Megan: Oh, implausible. I am going to should hear for it subsequent time I am at Hong Kong airport. And you have talked about this subject a few instances within the dialog. Look, once we’re speaking about cloud modernization, cybersecurity could be a roadblock to agility, I suppose, if it isn’t managed successfully. So may you additionally inform us in just a little extra element how Cathay Pacific has built-in safety into its digital transformation journey, notably with the adoption of improvement safety operations practices that you have talked about?
Rajeev: Yeah, that is an attention-grabbing one. I take care of cybersecurity in addition to the infrastructure companies. With each of those important features round my hand, I should be conscious of each elements, proper? Sure, it is an attention-grabbing one and it has modified over the time period, and I absolutely perceive why cybersecurity practices must be inflexible as a result of there’s quite a lot of compliance and it’s a extremely regulated perform, but when one thing goes flawed, as a CISO we’re held accountable for these faults. I can perceive why the crew is so inflexible of their practices. And I additionally perceive from a enterprise perspective it could possibly be perceived as a street blocker to agility.
One of many key elements that we’ve got performed in Cathay is we’ve got been following DevOps for fairly various years, and lately, I believe within the final two years, we began implementing DevSecOps into our STLC [software testing life cycle]. And what it basically means is fairly than the core cybersecurity crew being chargeable for lots of the safety testing and people types of elements, we wish to shift left a few of these capabilities into the builders in order that the individuals who develop the code now are held accountable for the testing and the standard of the output. They usually’re additionally enabled when it comes to the cybersecurity course of. Proper?
In fact, once we began off this journey, there was an enormous resistance on the safety crew itself as a result of they do not actually belief the builders making an attempt to do the testing or the testing outputs. However over a time period with the introduction of assorted instruments and automation that’s put in place, that is now getting right into a matured stage whereby it’s now enabling the upfront groups to deal with all of the elements of safety, like risk modeling, code scanning, and the vulnerability testing. However on the finish, the safety groups could be nonetheless validating and act as a type of a gatekeeper, however in a really mild and inbuilt processes. And this fashion we will be sure that our cloud functions are safe by design and by default they’ll ship them sooner and extra reliably to our prospects. And on this complete course of, proper?
Prior to now, safety has been at all times perceived as an accountability of the cybersecurity crew. And by enabling the builders of the safety elements, now you may have a greater possession within the group in terms of cybersecurity and it’s constructing a greater cybersecurity tradition throughout the group. And that, to me, is a key as a result of from a safety facet, we at all times say that persons are your first line of protection and sometimes they’re additionally the final line of protection. I am glad that by these processes we’re in a position to enhance that maturity within the group.
