At the tech industry event CES in January 2025, Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, unveiled Delta Concierge, the airline’s generative AI travel assistant. Its full rollout has happened under the watch of the new chief digital & technology officer, Amala Duggirala. As of August 2026, the tool reaches 100% of SkyMiles members to assist flyers with disruption support, self-service cancellations, and bag tracking.
Days into her Delta tenure, Amala Duggirala laid out her AI philosophy in a January 2026 essay on Medium, “Technology is the Easy Part, and Culture is the Hard Part.” Her core argument: With generative artificial intelligence, the technology isn’t the hard part. It’s adoption. “The technology is the vehicle, but culture is the engine,” she wrote, warning that the tempting “wait and see” approach is dangerous and risks leaving organizations behind.
Duggirala urges leaders to follow her lead at the airline: Operationalize generative AI rather than treating it merely as an experiment; train leadership immersively before rolling tools out widely; move from automating tasks to reimagining processes entirely; and cultivate “relentless learners.” “We’ve moved past ‘if AI’ to ‘how do we get ROI now,'” she wrote on LinkedIn.
Duggirala joined Delta in January 2026 in a new role uniting the airline’s enterprise technology and digital product functions under one leader for the first time, helping to build on AI successes from before her tenure, like Baggage AI, a real-time vehicle routing and dispatch optimizer pilot at the Atlanta airport that the airline says resulted in a 30% improvement in bag transfers. She reports directly to Bastian, the CEO, and sits on the company’s leadership committee. In announcing her hiring, Delta said Duggirala is deeply committed to “equipping Delta teams with advanced, agentic, and data-informed solutions.”
She arrived at Delta on the strength of her success as executive VP and CIO at USAA, where she made AI adoption an enterprise-wide effort, emphasizing workforce training and reskilling alongside technology deployment. During her tenure, USAA trained roughly 38,000 employees in AI awareness and grew to more than 200 AI products.