Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian believes AI could make the airline significantly more profitable.
During a recent appearance on the Airlines Confidential podcast, Bastian suggested that smarter decisions across the business could move Delta from a 10% margin to 15%, representing a 50% improvement in profitability.
He said:
“If we could take two, three, four points of our cost down from making smarter, better decisions over a series of several years, my gosh, you look at a margin at Delta, you go from a 10% margin to a 15% margin, it’s a 50% improvement in your profitability."
For an airline with huge operational complexity, that is an understandably enticing proposition. But AI’s potential role in pricing has caused concern among lawmakers, travelers, and customer experience professionals alike.
The question for Delta is whether it can use AI to improve the passenger journey without making customers feel as though they are being squeezed by a smarter, less transparent pricing machine.
Delta Is Betting on AI Across the Business
Bastian’s comments were not solely about ticket prices.
He pointed to AI’s potential across revenue management, maintenance, crew scheduling, and operational decision-making.
There is plenty of customer upside in that list. Better maintenance predictions could improve aircraft availability and reduce disruption. More accurate crew planning could help Delta recover faster when things go wrong. AI-assisted support tools could also help reservation specialists give customers more consistent answers.
In its official response to US senators, Delta stated that its reservation specialists are already using an AI-integrated knowledge management tool to source answers to complex questions “more quickly and accurately.”
The airline also said its maintenance and crew scheduling use cases could improve “aircraft availability and schedule reliability.”
That last point may be the most appealing to travelers, who will tolerate plenty when the airline gets them where they need to go on time, but are likely to be much less forgiving if the most visible outcome of Delta’s AI investment is a higher fare.
Delta Denies Using Personal Data to Set Fares
Delta recently has been experimenting with AI-powered revenue management technology from pricing vendor Fetcherr.
In 2025, the airline said it planned to deploy the technology across 20% of its domestic network by the end of that year.
At the time, that drew a sharp response from Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner, and Richard Blumenthal, who warned that individualized pricing could mean fare increases up to each consumer’s personal “pain point.”
Delta has strongly rejected that characterization.
“There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized prices based on personal data,” said Peter Carter, Delta’s EVP and Chief External Affairs Officer, in the official Delta response.
Carter added that the AI functionality uses aggregated data and serves as a decision-support tool for analysts. Delta says its fares are based on publicly available rules and objective criteria, including origin, destination, length of stay, advance purchase, refundability, and cabin selection.
The airline also said customers do not have to sign in to Delta.com or the Fly Delta app to compare prices.
That distinction is seemingly an unofficial dynamic pricing rebuke.
A system where fares shift according to demand, competition, capacity, and timing, has been part of air travel for decades. Delta is not saying it will use browsing history, personal circumstances, or previous purchases to charge one person more than another for the same ticket.
