 Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, my host, Lisa Martin here, with some keynote guests who are on the big stage here at Reinvent, Linda Jojo, Chief Digital Officer at United Airlines. Thanks for coming on. Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So up on the big stage, big transformation story in front of 27,000 people on the virtual. Is that many? That's the number. It's a big room. Small for Amazon web services, nearly 60,000, pandemic and all, but great presentation. What was the transformation story for United? Well, I think there's two parts of the story. One is just how fast everything happened. You know, February of 2020, we're having a kickoff meeting with AWS about how we're going to really transform the airline and a month later, the world shut down. And so it changed. We went from thinking about the future to really just trying to make it through the next few weeks. But as soon as that happened, we knew that we had to take advantage of the crisis and think about everything from, what can we do with our onboard products? We've changed out a lot of things about our airplanes. We've doubled down on sustainability. We're really focused on the diversity of our workforce. But also, we really said, what can we do about transforming our technology? And that's where AWS came in because one of the silver linings for our tech team was that we didn't always have a plane in the air. And so when that happens, we had no time to make a change and back it out if it doesn't work or heaven forbid, have an outage. We had a little bit longer, so we got aggressive. And we made a lot of changes and made a lot of move to AWS cloud. Talk to me a little bit about the cultural shift involved. I mean, you talked about, you know, everybody was scrambling. So quickly there was this instance, what do we do? How do we pivot? Live mode, but from a cultural perspective, it sounds like you took, you leveraged the situation to be able to make a lot of improvements across the United. But culturally, that's challenging to get all those folks on board at the same time. How did you facilitate that? Well, you know, the story I'm going to tell isn't all just about me. It's about the incredible team that we have. But you know, folks got focused and Amazon talks about having a two pizza team about how if your team should be no bigger than what can be fed by two pizzas and that really keeps the decision making streamline and fast. For us, since we were now all working from home, we called it a one screen team. And so the idea was no more than the number of people that could fit on that video call was the idea. So that was the number of people that we had on our teams. We branded, we even called them scrappy teams, which was really kind of fun. And those are the groups that just kind of got their job done. You know, the first part of their job was every week or every day it seemed like we were getting new rules from the US government about what countries you couldn't fly to. And it was chaotic. It was confusing for customers. And frankly, that one screen team, they were up like every night making modifications to who could check in online and who couldn't. And we said when it's time to open back up, we can't, we got to do this better. And so that group came up with something we now call the travel ready center, which is really pretty incredible. What you can do now is, first of all, when you book your flight, we'll tell you what you need to fly. You need this type of a COVID test this many days in advance. This is what fully vaccinated means in the country you're going to. And so this is the kind of vaccine card we need to see. You upload it all. We use Amazon SageMaker and we have machine learning models that actually now, well, within seven seconds validate that you're ready to fly. And what that means is just like always, you can get your boarding pass before you get to the airport. Now, if you guys travel a lot, I hope you still do. What that means is that you can actually bypass the lobby of the airport and all the document checking that's going on because you're travel ready. So customers love it. Gate agents love it too because gate agents, the rules are changing so fast. They don't, you know, and they work the flight to Tel Aviv one day and the flight to Paris the next and the rules are different and maybe in between they changed. So having the software actually figure that out is what helps. So very dynamic and new innovations popped out of this pandemic. What else did Amazon help you with? Was there other Amazon innovations that you guys gravitated to? SageMaker was one. What was some of the other Amazon? You know, honestly, the team uses a lot of the tools in a lot of different ways. I would say the other big one was DynamoDB and some of the things that we did to actually migrate some of our core systems to Amazon and actually, you know, instead of making phoning home to data centers all the time, we're now going right to the cloud and getting some really great performance out of that. And the travel thing that you guys did, that came out of the innovation from the teams. Is there any other examples that popped out from you guys? Yeah, well, I think another one is something that we call agent on demand. Agent on demand is where you used to, when you had to talk to an agent in the airport, you'd go get in line somewhere. And sometimes it was a long line, right? Because there's only two people there. And so the first thing we did was we make sure the technology they use worked on a phone or an iPad. So now we weren't limited by the number of stations at the gate. The next thing we did is that we made a QR code enabled, and now what customers can do is they can scan the QR code and they get a live agent, like a FaceTime call, on their phone, they can do it from anywhere, from their seat at the gate or in line for a coffee, and they can solve their problem right there. And those agents, by the way, now maybe there's a snowstorm going on in Chicago, but the agents are in Houston where it's sunny. And so we can actually leverage the fact that those agents are there to help our customers. So you got the user experience, you did some innovation. How about the operational things? I noticed when I traveled United, the packaging's different, the greetings are different. I get it wiped, all these operational impacts happened to the whole supply chain. Yeah, well, you know, the technology's great, but what makes you remember United or the people that you're going to interact with? And so we really focused on service for our employees. And how do we give them information in the palm of their hand to treat you in a very personal way? We know that you flew last week and where you went. We know that you just made a million miles. And so we can give that information to our flight attendant and they can provide a really great experience. That experience is key these days. One of the things that's been in short supply during the pandemic is patience, and obviously you guys have to be very cognizant with some of the things that have happened across all the airlines and passengers not having the patience that they normally would have. Well, I'll tell you, that is a real kudos to our flight attendants. And what we did with them, you know, wearing a mask is required on the aircraft. And, you know, some folks don't like to be told what to do anywhere, right? And so people don't like that. Our flight attendants learned how to de-escalate the situation and deal with it on the ground. So it's very simple. You're not wearing a mask, flight attendant asks you nicely. You still don't put your mask on. They just give you a little card that says, by the way, if you don't put your mask on, this is going to be your last United flight. And the vast majority of customers put their masks on. So we have not seen some of that level of stress that's happened on some of other airlines. That's key, because it's been pretty rampant. But the fact that you're making things much more accessible and in real time, I think another thing we learned during the pandemic is that real time is no longer a nice to have. It's essential. We have this expectation as consumers, whether we're flying or we're buying something from an online retailer that we're going to be able to get whatever we want in the palm of our hand. Yeah, well, you know, what we like to say, we're very proud of our mobile app, very proud of it. But we like to say that we're not comparing our mobile app to another airline mobile app. You're comparing it to the last app you probably used and that might have been the Amazon app. So we have to be as good as the Amazon app, but we have a lot of legacy technology behind it. And so we have really focused on that. I want to ask you, because you're a chief digital officer because this comes up in a lot of our CUBE conversations around the digital side is that obviously with the virtual and now hybrid, things, new innovations have happened. So I have to ask you, what's changed for the better that's going to be around and what might not be around that you've learned from the pandemic because these new things are emerging, new standards, new protocols, new digital experiences. What have you learned that's going to stay around and what kind of went away? Well, I think nothing tells you about how important your customers are if you're standing in the middle of O'Hare and not seeing any. And that's what happened in April of 2020 when we actually, there was a day that year, that month, that we had more pilots than passengers. It was just, you know, so you realize it's really all about the customer. And what we have to do is make sure that customers choose us. There might be less reasons to fly to certain places all the time, but when you do fly, we want you to pick United and so it's got to be more than just where we fly. It's got to be the experiences you have with the people and we have to use the technology to make it easier. I mean, touchless wasn't really a thing. QR codes are back. I mean, they were gone, right? We have QR codes on everything now because you want to get through that airport without having to touch anything and you do that with your mobile app. Yeah, great innovations. It is a great innovation. That contact list is key. You're talking about QR codes coming back and just some of the things that we've, some of the silver linings. And frankly, there have been some the last 22 months or so, but being able to have that experience that's tailored to me as a consumer, I don't need to know what's under the hood enabling it. I just know I want to be able to make transactions or find whatever I need to in the palm of my hand 24 seven. Yeah. And you know, for airlines, it usually comes back to something went wrong. And frankly, there's always something that going quite right. There's a weather delay somewhere, maybe your bag didn't get on the same flight you did. And so we want to give you transparency in that and controlled over what you can do. And so how make it easier to read book, make you understand what the situation is, be very transparent about it. And we even have something called connection saver. And what we do with that is we actually use real-time data analytics. And what we do is we say, there's that person that's arriving late. And then we say with real-time weather, real-time connection data, we say, can we hold that flight for Lisa? And we, yeah. The worst thing is when that door closed, you run all the way through the airport and they close the door, right? We don't want to do, our data agents don't like doing that either. And so we use calculations that say, you know, the wind is blowing in the right direction, the pilots can make up the time. There isn't anybody on the other side that's going to miss a connection. And so about 2,000 times a day, we hold a connection for a customer. Yeah, that's key. If you miss, sometimes you stay overnight if you miss that connection. Especially on the last flight of the day, we'll be very generous because that doesn't do anybody any good. Well, great story, I love the keynote. Cloud has changed, I have to ask you, this year at ReInvent, what's your observation on the cloud? As the cloud continues to expand, as Adam is talking about, how do you guys see the cloud evolving for United? Well, you know, I think what's really impressive here is everybody is coming from every industry. It's not one or two industries that are here or early adopters in the industry. It really is what you have to do to survive. But I probably would be remiss not to say that what was really great was that there were two women on the keynote stage and two men. So we were at 50-50. Now, there are 51% women in the world, but we'll take it in all seriousness. I do think that there's a lot more diversity here. And I think that's good, not just for AWS. That's good for everybody. Oh, I couldn't agree more. That was one of the first things I noticed this morning when you took the keynote stage was a strong female leader before you even started telling the story and that's something from an optics perspective. I know that Amazon is really keen on, but it's nice to hear from your perspective as well that there's that diversity. There's also that thought diversity when you have different perspectives coming into play because there's so many dynamics going on these days. But I have to ask you one question. We talk about every company these days being a data company, being a digital company, needing to be competitive. Do you think of United, should we be thinking about United as a digital first company? Well, we connect people, right? And so we are physically moving people from one destination to another and they really want to get there. So we're not going to always be digital, but I would tell you that I often speak with our chief customer officer and our chief operating officer. And it's really hard for us to talk about anything without talking about technology or how it impacts the operation or how it impacts our customer. It's really, really messing together for sure. Great stuff, Linda. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. United Airlines chief digital officer on the main stage here at ReInvent and now on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the tech leader in event coverage. Thanks for watching.