Six months into his role as CEO of aviation data provider OAG, Filip Filipov said the company's technology efforts are starting to pay off, but consumer expectations have been particularly surprising.
“Customer preferences are actually moving faster than what technology can do to meet them, both on the consumer side but also on the B2B side where we operate,” Filipov said during an interview in the PhocusWire studio at Phocuswright Europe.
“I think, as an industry, we’re probably trying to catch up with the customers’ dreams of what the product could look like. So that was a little bit of a surprise to me—how quickly technology is moving.”
And while AI implementation was less of a shock, Filipov was again impressed with how quickly things have progressed.
“The speed and pace of adoption of AI to allow our processes to be a lot better has been delightfully surprising, and I knew it would happen, but I didn’t know it would happen that fast,” he said.
“Now, the teams across all of the functions, not just product engineering but also marketing, finance, commercial, they’re using AI, and we’re never going back to what it was before.”
Filipov added that AI is not equally distributed across different regions and organizations—a point he also made during a separate presentation at the conference.
“A startup, a smaller-sized company with the right decision makers in place can move quite fast. If you’re running a big organization that has established processes for the last 30-40 years, you need to make sure that PII information is not leaked ... most of the big banks right now, the best AI they can use in the company is Copilot in Word,” he said, noting that AI is often overhyped.
“When we say ‘AI,’ is that the product? Is that the technology that builds the product? Is that the distribution? I think we put it all together into one, and I think we’re not there yet.”
Filipov also discussed personal challenges as CEO, areas of innovation in travel, the importance of data in an AI world and more. Watch the full interview with PhocusWire’s Linda Fox below.
CEO Spotlight with Filip Filipov of OAG