Turkish Airlines accelerates AI rollout with Red Hat OpenShift

Turkish Airlines has selected Red Hat to support its transition to a data- and AI-driven organisation with a focus on operational efficiency, customer experience and digital transformation across its global business.

The implementation involves Red Hat OpenShift AI, an open source platform designed to facilitate rapid development, deployment and scaling of AI models.

Turkish Airlines currently operates scheduled flights to 353 destinations worldwide and employs nearly 90,000 people, serving both consumer and business segments. The airline sought to use AI to enhance various operational areas, including dynamic pricing, fraud detection, technical maintenance and fuel consumption optimisation.

In seeking a platform that could deliver scalability and avoid vendor lock-in, Turkish Airlines identified open source as being essential for its long-term plans. The deployment of Red Hat OpenShift AI was supported by Red Hat Consulting, enabling integration with the airline's existing systems and creating automated processes for AI model deployment and monitoring.

Serdar Gürbüz, General Manager at Turkish Technology, a Turkish Airlines subsidiary, said: "As Turkish Airlines continues its journey to becoming a fully data-driven organization, our focus is on embedding AI across every aspect of the business. From operational efficiency to customer experience, AI is strongly supporting our strategic decision-making processes. To enable this transformation, we have built a secure, scalable infrastructure based on open architectures. In this journey, Red Hat has served not just as a technology provider, but as a partner whose open source philosophy aligns closely with our own. Platforms like Red Hat OpenShift AI allow us to keep data on-premises while accelerating model development and enabling business units to leverage AI capabilities in a flexible way. This approach is helping us move AI beyond isolated use cases and into a scalable, organization-wide capability. As Turkish Airlines, we believe that the use of AI will play a vital role in enhancing our key achievements in the aviation industry."

By transitioning to Red Hat OpenShift AI and Red Hat OpenShift, Turkish Airlines reports that it has been able to create new development environments in minutes instead of hours, and has doubled the speed of deployment for AI projects. This allows data scientists and technical teams to quickly access organisational data and resources for their projects.

The new infrastructure benefits from automatic scaling for projects through OpenShift AI's provisioning and autoscaling features, freeing up operational teams for other high-value tasks and reducing routine maintenance costs through automated monitoring and fixes. This has addressed previous limitations related to resource allocation, enabling multiple data scientists to use the same datasets without disruption.

"Platforms like Red Hat OpenShift AI allow us to keep data on-premises while accelerating model development and enabling business units to leverage AI capabilities in a flexible way," stated Gürbüz.

The integration has allowed Turkish Airlines to improve several specific operations. These include enhanced accuracy in dynamic pricing for ticket sales, improved models for fraud prevention across payment systems and loyalty programmes, AI-powered customer service chatbots, and optimisation of aircraft assignment to save fuel. Further benefits are found in more informed operations management, such as improved block time prediction and on-time performance, which helps reduce delays.

Over 60 AI models are currently live across the airline's operations, with at least 40 under development. More than 200 staff members are engaged in AI-related projects, and that number is expected to rise as further adoption and integration take place.

Red Hat representatives noted that the airline's adoption of these open source tools has helped increase collaboration between teams and expanded the number of employees empowered to work on AI projects, supporting broader adoption of digital and AI-focused working cultures at the airline.

Haluk Tekin, Country Manager for Türkiye and CIS at Red Hat, commented: "Creating citizen data scientists is a crucial achievement to enterprise-wide AI adoption, and we are honoured to collaborate with Turkish Airlines, the airline flying to more countries than any other, in this pursuit by making AI tools and platforms more accessible to every employee. Red Hat is committed to supporting the wide-scale cultural and technological transformation at Turkish Airlines, while also helping to improve operational flexibility, IT agility and AI application development speed through cross-team collaboration."

Red Hat stated its future vision as one supporting "any model, any accelerator, any cloud", aiming to enable organisations to deploy models flexibly across different platforms and infrastructure without being impeded by high costs or fragmentation.