The global aeronautical sector, faced with challenges of sustainability, growth and innovation, must find a new model. Manufacturers and airlines must both innovate to reduce their carbon emissions and meet the expectations of their increasingly numerous and demanding customer-travelers.
To meet these challenges, the SALESFORCE platform, Net Zero Cloud, allows an innovative approach. Thanks to the power of data and the support of artificial intelligence, an airline can have complete visibility of its carbon footprint, expose part of its data and processes with its suppliers and customers, and ultimately measure and evaluate the impacts of its various actions.
Upstream and downstream, SALESFORCE supports all types of players in the sector. SALESFORCE’s innovation here is the complete sharing of data from marketing, sales and customer departments, around a single collaborative platform, so that market expectations in terms of quality, security and environmental performance can be monitored in real time and the effectiveness of solutions reinforced. Airbus, for example, plans to go from production of 60 planes to 75 per month by 2025. Similarly, the airline JetBlue, specializing in business travel, has had all of the data (thanks to the Net Zero Cloud solution) on its carbon footprint. All its partners also receive the emission reports transparently. Enough to work with confidence on the objective of carbon neutrality by 2040.
3 questions to Antoine de Kerviler, Strategic Industry advisor
L’Express: What are SALESFORCE’s main missions with companies in the airline sector?
Antoine de Kerviler: Our first mission is to help airlines improve customer relationship management. We allow them to connect all the data collected from travelers, company employees and subcontractors. Our objective is to connect the entire ecosystem, in compliance with data protection regulations, for very high transparency which did not exist until now, and a better service.
L’Express: How does the Net Zero Cloud platform, developed by SALESFORCE, allow them to achieve these objectives?
AK: Airlines, which today emit 2.5% of the world’s CO2, must be able to launch actions and measure their effectiveness. To trace this efficiency, whether we talk about reducing waste, reducing CO2 emissions, vis-à-vis their customers, their suppliers, the authorities. And the Net Zero Cloud platform serves to achieve these goals.
L’Express: How far back does the use of data go in the aviation sector value chain?
AK: We go further and further up the value chains with ever finer traceability. Both in the plane, and with the suppliers of equipment installed by the manufacturers. This is to allow them to include in their calculations all emissions made by other suppliers or subcontractors. And downstream, this traceability extends to travelers’ wishes and helps improve customer relations. When you contact the airline, the agent who has all the necessary information on your profile will be able to be quicker and more efficient. Our customers, manufacturers and airlines, all over the world, premium or low cost, have the same objective, to be virtuous in terms of the environment.