“AI Can Be a Real Game Changer”: Anne Rigail Takes the Stage at the Matins HEC

She is steering Air France through skies disrupted by geopolitical crises and the rise of AI. Speaking at the Matin HEC on Friday, the airline’s CEO explained how the French flag carrier climbed into the global top 10 of the Skytrax rankings — and how it is preparing for what comes next.

Between soaring jet fuel prices, supply-chain disruptions and the challenge of artificial intelligence, Air France is navigating its fair share of turbulence. Little wonder, then, that CEO Anne Rigail drew a full house at the latest Matin HEC. An engineer by training who entered the aviation industry in 1991, Rigail took questions from Emmanuel Duteil, Editor-in-Chief of Challenges, before opening the floor to the audience. Her answers, precise yet straightforward, revealed a leader with an intimate command of the issues facing the airline.

When she took the helm of Air France in December 2018, becoming the first woman to lead the airline since its creation in 1933, she could hardly have anticipated what was ahead. “Managing crises is part of our daily lives,” she is fond of saying. “You have quite an ambitious definition of ‘daily’,” joked Adrien Nussenbaum (H.01), President of HEC Alumni, as he opened his first Matin HEC.

“With Covid, the war in Ukraine and now the Middle East, the frequency of crises has clearly intensified,” observes the CEO. The conflict involving Iran is weighing on jet fuel prices, but Rigail remains reassuring. Fears of shortages did not materialize over the summer. Supply flows have been reorganized, with Europe importing more from the United States and Africa. “We see absolutely no risk of shortages,” she says.

Fuel, which accounts for roughly a third of the price of an airline ticket, is only one part of the logistical puzzle. Since Covid, the aerospace supply chain has never fully regained its balance. “Spare engines, APUs — the small turbines located in the tail of aircraft — computers: I have never had so many aircraft unable to fly because parts simply weren’t arriving,” says Anne Rigail. The airline has had to increase the number of reserve aircraft in its fleet, bringing additional costs with it.

From 25th to 7th in the world

Before taking charge of the airline, Rigail built a distinctly operational career. She worked in customer service, connections and baggage operations before managing airport operations and flight crews. Nearly 35 years within essentially the same company: she began at Air Inter before it was absorbed into Air France.

That operational background did not prevent her from orchestrating a remarkable move upmarket. In 2018, Air France ranked just 25th in Skytrax, the international benchmark ranking for airlines. It has now climbed to seventh place worldwide, behind a leading group dominated by Asian and Gulf carriers.

The formula? First, refusing to sacrifice the long term in response to successive crises. In the midst of Covid, Air France-KLM, under the leadership of CEO Ben Smith, chose to invest heavily in renewing its fleet and upgrading its premium offering. “It was a gamble. Today, we can see that it was the right one,” says Rigail.

The airline is now investing more than €1 billion in the customer experience, in addition to around €1 billion a year in its fleet. New business-class seats with privacy doors, renovated lounges and free high-speed Wi-Fi are all part of the plan — investments designed to help Air France compete with the Gulf carriers.

AI, meanwhile, promises a significant leap in productivity. The aviation industry already has one major advantage: airlines spend much of their time optimizing. Ticket prices, aircraft utilization, routes, fuel consumption, maintenance, flight schedules — almost everything is subject to constant fine-tuning.

“We optimize everything, and we have enormous amounts of data. What changes the game is the arrival of generative AI and, now, agentic AI,” says Rigail.

Air France has identified around “120 use cases” with very practical applications, including a chatbot that allows technicians to quickly retrieve a specific part reference. “When faced with a rare failure, the tool can search for a comparable incident that occurred two years earlier and show how the teams resolved it,” adds the Mines Paris graduate.

The CEO points to a striking return on investment: around €200,000 spent on a generative AI development project has reportedly already generated €30 million in gains by accelerating optimization processes previously carried out using more conventional models. That represents an ROI of 150x.

“The airlines that win will be those that adopt these solutions before the others,” she predicts.

But the most strategic battle may take place elsewhere: in ticket sales. Airlines have relied on yield management for decades, continuously adjusting prices according to demand and competitors. Over the years, they have also unbundled their offers: baggage or no baggage, seat selection, flexibility, additional services and more.

AI could simplify that experience by presenting travelers not with a maze of fares and options, but directly with the offer that best matches their needs. “AI can be a real game changer,” says Anne Rigail.

More importantly, customers are beginning to plan their trips directly through assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude. For Air France, this creates a strategic question: how can the airline be present at the very moment a consumer asks an AI assistant where they should go on holiday, and then accompany them all the way through to booking — without allowing new intermediaries to capture most of the value?

AI could even help the airline reduce its climate footprint. Air France is testing models capable of identifying areas where contrails are likely to form and suggesting alternative flight paths, provided that the additional fuel required to avoid them does not outweigh the resulting climate benefit.

The race for scale is back

Technology alone, however, will not be enough. In an industry with considerable fixed costs, “scale matters,” Rigail stresses.Air France-KLM currently owns just under 20% of Scandinavian carrier SAS and aims to take control of the airline by the end of the year. The group is also eyeing Portuguese carrier TAP, which would notably strengthen its access to passenger flows between Europe and South America.

Facing Lufthansa and IAG — the group behind British Airways, Iberia and Vueling — Air France-KLM intends to remain firmly among the industry’s global heavyweights.