Alaska Airlines’  Lindsay-Rae McIntyre on the Flight Plan for AI that Actually Lands Alaska Airlines’  Lindsay-Rae McIntyre on the Flight Plan for AI that Actually Lands

Jenny Chatman (0:00)

Your grandfather was one of Air Canada's first 747 pilots. It's true.

Lindsay-Rae McIntyre (0:05)

He very much believed that his responsibility, along with the rest of the flight crew, was to get people there efficiently and safely, but also to make it a great experience. And so he taught me really early on about what it's like to be a brand ambassador and be really accountable to the culture of the organization that you work for, and how that comes forward in every interaction you have.

Jenny Chatman (0:35)

Welcome back to The Culture Kit. I'm so excited to talk with Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Alaska Air. If you were at our Culture Connect Conference at the Haas School of Business last January, you surely remember her talk there. Lindsay-Rae has a wonderful perspective on culture. She spent the majority of her career at IBM and Microsoft, putting her at the cutting edge of technology. She joined Alaska Air about six months ago and is passionate about growing business through inclusive and innovative people strategies, which we'll learn more about in today's discussion.

But before we get going, let me do something I don't usually do on my own and welcome you to the show.

I'm Jenny Chatman, a professor and dean at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. And this is The Culture Kit, where we give you the tools to build a healthy and effective workplace culture. My co-host Sameer Srivastava is away today, so I'm flying solo. Lindsay-Rae, it's great to see you again.

Lindsay-Rae McIntyre (1:41)

Thanks for having me on The Culture Kit.

Jenny Chatman (1:43)

So Lindsay-Rae, I've been looking forward to this conversation.

After that great talk at our conference where you laid out such a compelling framework for building an AI ready workforce, your approach at Microsoft was to help employees at every level from training and skill development to manager excellence, talent management, and culture and inclusion. Now, you're at Alaska Airlines, which has a different workforce profile, and yet still has strong technology needs, particularly around operations and flight planning. What's the same or different about AI transformation at Alaska Airlines? Has it shifted your thinking about AI readiness?

Lindsay-Rae McIntyre (2:21)

For me, I spent 30 years in technology. I've had the real privilege of doing AI twice, really. I did it with IBM. I don't know if you remember when Watson beat Jeopardy in 2012 and then obviously IBM went on a journey with AI.

Then again, at Microsoft, of course, the large language models are incredibly more powerful today than they were when we first started this work at scale. But what I would say about joining Airlines and Alaska Airlines in particular is that Alaska as a result of its global growth and scale is using AI to really innovate and leapfrog. When I was with you last January, we talked about the ways in which Microsoft was using AI to completely overhaul learning and development to be able to get to the skilling in the flow of work for employees because that's where they expect it. I would say the same is true for Airlines. I had a hypothesis that finally the manager job is about to be an amazing job because all the administrative overhead and crud that we don't really love as managers is going to get done by AI. I would say that for sure that's also true in Airlines. That on the talent management front, people join companies because they want to have not only a job, they want to have a vision for how they can grow and learn and adapt and stay employable and really put their talents to use, but also pursue new and different things along the way. Then we had a pretty cool conversation at your conference about the employee experience and how the human resources function is really expected to show up with a product mindset and delight end users, not just dump a whole bunch of cool things at the foot of an employee and hope that they figure it out.

We've got to glue a bunch of those things together on the back end and really delight the employee in a way that consumer grade companies have been delighting consumers for a long time. It turns out that even though Microsoft is 220,000 people in 190 countries and Alaska's 32,000 people, all of those themes prove to be real and true here.

Jenny Chatman (4:40)

Can you give an example of how you've delighted your employees with an AI use case? Yeah, I would give you two.

Lindsay-Rae McIntyre (4:50)

So on the operational side of our business, airlines are first and foremost focused on safety and operational excellence at a rate and a pace that is unbelievably impressive, at least to me as somebody who's new to the industry. And so Alaska has been an early investor in AI technology and co-innovation with startups in the aviation AI space. But internally, Alaska has been investing in an AI solution that will start to collect all of the safety reports from employees and guests across the operation. And it doesn't really matter whether it's a big thing or a small thing. But historically, we've had to be able to collect those and then in a pretty high-intensive way pour through all of the reports to action them, disposition them, remove duplicates. Well, AI can do all of that for us. And so it's a really incredible use case to be able to honor the deep commitment to safety across the airline while also freeing up capacity and time to focus on running the airline, of course, keeping human judgment and context at the center. In my own HR team, we spent the month of August doing sprints.