My work
Currently I am a Lead Product Manager at IBS Software, for an AI driven pricing engine for airlines, iDAP. Prior to this role I have handled several technical and engineering managerial roles within IBS Software. My area of interest and work is primarily around building AI and ML products, particularly from a commercial aspect covering both price and product determination elements through personalization.
I started my position as a Product Manager, responsible of building an AI driven pricing engine for airlines in January 2019. I was able to successfully build a product from scratch, that delivered 3% revenue improvement for a leading full service airline in the Americas region. I was deeply involved in almost every aspect of the product and my work in each area is detailed here :
- Defined the product from scratch, mastering the airline pricing and revenue management challenges, applying ML solutions, and defining the future roadmap.
- Conceived and perfected the AEQ (Airline Experience Quotient) concept and formula for computing the prices, which is the core of the product.
- Developed a unique methodology to plug the product into an airline IT ecosystem without significant changes, enabling easy adoption for airlines.
- Perfected the product through A/B tests, experiments and live trials with airlines.
- Successfully rolled out the product in production, and the system derived an average of 2 – 3 % and a maximum of 6% improvement in revenue.
- Conceived an innovative GTM (Go to Market) strategy that targets the most apt customers for the product.
- Generated leads through webinars, white papers and blogs, speaking at events etc.
- Provided the engineering team with the business and functional direction.
- Guided the engineering team to build a high-performance system that adds very little overhead while computing the prices for air tickets and ancillaries, and plugs in seamlessly to an airline IT landscape.
- Guided the Data Science team with the business and functional direction.
- Worked closely with Data Scientist and ML engineers to design, build, roll out and perfect the ML engine at the core of the product.
Publications, talks and more
Industry talks
Talk on implementing AI driven pricing for airlines at ATPCO Elevate
I was invited to speak at the Dynamic Offers Design Team meeting at 'Elevate + TravelConnect’ on April 09, 2024, at Washington DC. I shared my experience in building and successfully rolling out a Machine Learning based pricing system for a major airline in the Americas.
Webinars
Webinar on personalized pricing for airlines
Moderated a webinar on why airlines should move away from traditional inventory control based dynamic pricing and embrace personalized pricing based on Machine Learning, on 26 August 2020
Webinar on AI driven price determination for airlines
Conducted a webinar on how airlines can implement AI based price determination for tickets in a phased manner, eventually achieving true continuous pricing, on 22 February 2022.
Academic papers and articles
Exploring Deep-Q-Learning in the context of Airline pricing
A technical paper presented at the 2023 Revenue Management SG meeting held in Helsinki, Finland, from June 5 - 7, 2023, on using Deep Q Learning to determine optimal fares for airline tickets.
Transfer learning to scale deep Q networks in the context of airline pricing
An article published in the prestigious "Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management" on using transfer learning to scale the usage of Reinforcement Learning for airline ticket pricing. Published on 10 August 2024.
E-books and white papers
Simplifying Personalization for the Travel and Hospitality Industry
I wrote this e-book to evangelize how AI and ML could be used to personalize customer experience in the travel and hospitality industry by implementing intelligent Price and Product determination. This was published on 21 January 2021.
AI-driven price determination - a phased approach to continuous pricing
As part of building the pipeline for the iDAP product, I published this whitepaper on 06 October 2022. This details a phased approach for airlines to achieve continuous pricing and was used as the main collateral for the sales teams to pitch the product to potential customers.
Blogs
Airline Revenue Management - The world is moving forward, do not be left behind
I published this blog on 28 November 2023. This blog talks about how traditional airline revenue management will evolve in the coming years, with the adoption of machine learning.
You need to do more than just invest in NDC
This blog was published on 30 July 2024. This blog explores the reason for the slow pace in the widespread adoption of NDC in the airline world. This is important as NDC adoption is one thing that can enable airlines switch to new ML based pricing and RM systems.