According to Digital MRO Market by Technology, a report published by Markets and Market, “the artificial intelligence and Big Data analytics segment is estimated to have the largest share of the North American MRO market in 2023.”

However, in our discussion with Mario, he was quick to point out that not everyone in the MRO market is jumping on the AI hype train.

Looking at the landscape, I see large enterprises investing heavily in digital technologies – especially when it comes to AI and so on. However, I also see a lot of smaller and specialised MROs, which don’t have the capacity, investing in the same way. Maybe they lack the IT or the staff, or maybe they just can’t relate to or care about the specific technology. There is still a broad spectrum of adoption in the MRO market.

AI to keep stock of stock

The final sectors in the industry where we want to look harder at AI disruption are near-and-dear to our hearts: procurement and inventory management.

We know that some of the questions that influence the actions of an operator are: “When do I need to do a specific maintenance task?” and “How can I become better at predicting exactly when I will need a specific part, so I can ensure that I have it ready at hand for that maintenance task?”

This is where machine learning and AI have made great strides in recent years by developing prediction models that help remove the problematic nature of maintenance or repairs, thus allowing operators to assess the risk of stocking materials.

On the procurement side, several companies have developed or integrated AI models into their procurement solutions. At Satair we have launched Lilly –which can understand, learn and answer customer quotes and requests.

It is through the likes of Lilly that we can see an obvious example of how the structured information of procurement and inventory management is being filtered through unstructured AI to automate, speed up, and make procurement more accurate and efficient.

What you should take away from this

The impact of AI is changing the world as we know it on an almost daily basis to the extent we will most definitely see more and more implementations of the kind of generative AI that we know from programs like ChatGPT within the aviation industry. But for the foreseeable future it will be the subsets of AI, computer sciences like machine learning, which will have the most significant impact on the industry.

Even the computer scientists developing AI technologies are still not fully aware of the extent of where this technology will take us. But there is no doubt it will be a future that is much grander than we can imagine.

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Is this the beginning of the aviation industry's AI transformation?