First of all, we wanted to test the Watson products with a real use case to understand how to make use of these technologies. So we started to use IBM Watson products, including Watson explorer, Watson Assistant and Watson Natural Language Understanding in our internal Service Help Center and implemented a cognitive search. As this turned out to be running very well, we immediately expanded the usage of cognitive systems for nearly all of our customer service centers, as all call center agents need a lot of distributed information in order to make the customers happy.

Secondly, we wanted to have the right organizational format to best deliver AI use cases in Watson technologies. So, we decided to scale AI initiatives from single projects to a dedicated team, the AI Studio. The AI Studio is a joint IBM and Lufthansa team working in different roles and agile methodology that allows to quickly test new AI-based business ideas, implement prototypes, and roll them out within the company.

We modernized our Data Science tool landscape with the help of IBM. Prior to this we had a lot of DS who had models running on their notebooks. We had an on-prem solution. We setup a modern cloud-native Data Science Platform using PAAS Services such as Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning and other PAAS services around data such as cloud storage and Kubernetes. This is now an open platform for all our data scientists from all airlines within LH Group to facilitate their use cases.