How to scale AI with integrity and trust?
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In this article, Jackson Pek, Chief Corporate & Legal Affairs Officer, discusses how Amadeus is leveraging AI to drive innovation across the travel ecosystem. He explores how Agentic AI is more autonomous than previous models, presenting both opportunities and risks, such as bias, data privacy, and error propagation. Jackson emphasizes that robust governance, trusted data, and responsible adoption are essential for scaling AI with integrity and ensuring its safe, real-world impact across the industry.
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, many business leaders are asking themselves fundamental questions about trust, transparency, and responsibility in the age of AI. As artificial intelligence accelerates change across industries, it’s natural to wonder how to confidently navigate these shifts, apply new technologies, and assure your customers that their trust is well placed. We recognize these concerns and aim to address them by sharing how organizations, including Amadeus, are approaching governance and integrity in AI adoption.
At Amadeus, strong governance, clear strategy and solid principles are essential to enabling innovation across our business. Our focus is on ensuring that transformational technologies, like artificial intelligence, are adopted responsibly, while also creating the right conditions for ideas to flourish. This helps us move boldly supported by a framework that is both robust and trusted.
When Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) first became a major topic, we took a step back to consider what responsible use should mean for our organization. How could we leverage it to boost innovation while also safeguarding our integrity? I reflected on these questions in an earlier article on Generative AI governance.
Now, with Agentic AI front and center, it’s a good time to revisit the topic, exploring where Amadeus fits into the AI landscape today, the potential risks of this technology and the steps we are taking to ensure its safe deployment.
Where does Amadeus fit in an AI-driven world?
The rise of Agentic AI is creating new opportunities for Amadeus, allowing us to lean into our position at the center of the travel ecosystem.
As the neutral execution layer for travel, our position is grounded in three strengths:
For almost 40 years, we have developed our position as a trusted system of record across the travel industry. This means we provide the single source of truth for Offers and Orders, schedules and availability, and much more.
Our technology is deeply integrated across the travel industry, with decades of complex business logic connecting systems and workflows.
We operate at global scale across travel verticals and markets, powering millions of searches and bookings every day and up to 150,000 transactions per second at peak times.
These strengths collectively reinforce our role as a trusted technology partner, enabling innovation at scale and leveraging AI to augment and reinforce the Amadeus platform. My colleague Maria Plaza explains more on the Amadeus AI strategy in her recent blog here.
How is Agentic AI different – and what are the risks?
Agentic AI differs from earlier AI models by not just generating answers, but autonomously planning, taking actions, and completing multi-step tasks toward a goal. This creates new risks.
Bias can directly influence decisions, hallucinations can trigger real-world steps, sensitive data can be accessed or shared automatically, and errors can propagate across workflows. Agentic AI also introduces added governance challenges, such as accountability for actions and cybersecurity exposure through tool and system access.
These must all be considered and overcome. Travel is a highly regulated industry, where disruptions are inevitable. Availability, pricing, ticketing, passenger identity, and airport operations all demand accuracy, security, and resilience.
How does Amadeus ensure the safe use of AI?
With Amadeus’ integral position in the industry and new potential risks emerging, we have taken a number of steps to ensure safe use of this transformational technology.
These include:
The AI Compliance Program is a multi-year initiative designed to ensure our alignment with the EU AI Act and other emerging regulations. We are an early signatory of the AI Pact, an initiative encouraging early adoption of EU AI Act principles, demonstrating our dedication to ethical AI development, regulatory compliance, and engagement with other stakeholders in the AI ecosystem. The goal is to ensure that AI development and deployment within the EU promotes innovation while safeguarding public safety, fundamental rights, and core European values. At Amadeus, we fully support regulatory efforts that protect individual freedoms and promote responsible use of technology.
Through this program Amadeus has built and deployed a comprehensive Responsible AI Compliance framework, which serves as a foundational structure to ensure the ethical, secure, and compliant use of AI across all functions worldwide. It provides a risk-based and agile approach to support the rapid upscaling of AI use, while ensuring innovation does not compromise safety, privacy, or ethical standards. This framework is underpinned by the Amadeus AI Policy which enshrines our AI Ethics Principles of fairness and human oversight, reliability and safety, privacy and security, transparency, accountability, and sustainability.
To support rapid adoption without compromising on rigor, our new AI compliance processes are designed to scale through intuitive technology and standardized workflows. By giving use case owners clear guidance, guided inputs, and streamlined evidence capture, the approach helps teams complete robust compliance assessments efficiently and consistently—so risk based decisions can be made in a timely manner, even as the volume and complexity of AI use cases grows.
The AI Office is a transversal team driving the execution of Amadeus’ AI strategy. Its core mission is to align AI initiatives with business objectives, driving safe, scalable, and impactful adoption of AI across our business.
Amadeus transforming travel with AI
The promise of AI, and the tangible benefits already emerging, are significant, but so are the responsibilities that come with it. In a complex, regulated industry like travel, scaling AI safely requires more than technical capability and experimentation; it demands trust, governance and long-term thinking.
At Amadeus, these principles guide how we design, deploy, and oversee AI across our platform. By embedding responsibility into innovation from the start, we can ensure AI delivers meaningful benefits at scale. This is how we will support our customers, improve the traveler experience, and help build a more resilient and sustainable travel ecosystem.
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