>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Accenture Interactive. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Vegas at the Adobe Summit 2019. I think there's about 17,000 people. The first time we've been here but we've been excited to be here. There's a crazy good buzz and energy and actually a ton of CUBE alumni here at Adobe. We're greeting old friends but it's always great to meet new friends. And coming off of great mention in the keynote this morning we're excited to have Santiago Aldana. He is the CDO and CTO of Avianca. Welcome. >> Thank you, John. >> So I was surprised this morning, we were watching the keynote and there's Satya Nadella and he has a shout-out for you guys. >> It was quite a surprise. It was very engaging and I'm happy to hear that. >> Yeah, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> And a little fact, you guys are the second oldest commercial airline, he said. I had no idea. >> That's right, we've been flying for almost 100 years. It's our 100th anniversary this year. >> Awesome. >> So great, great. >> Well, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> So air travel's a really interesting industry because it's growing like crazy in terms of the total number of passenger miles, right? More people are flying all the time. But it's got to be super competitive. You got to worry about fuel costs. A seat mile is a seat mile. So there's all kinds of interesting ways to compete. You guys are really into it, you've been successful for 100 years, so how do you differentiate what you guys are doing and continue to evolve and be successful? >> So there's several things. If you look 10 years back we used to be a domestic airline. We used to have around 30 planes, now we're around 170 planes. We're the second largest airline in Latin America. That has been a huge growth. >> Wait, how long did you do that? >> That's for the last 10 years. >> 10 years you went from 30 planes to 170. >> To 170, 180. >> And domestic to international. >> To a Latin American airline. >> That's a big move. >> That's a big move but we're shifting our emphasis, going more, rather than growth, going to profitability. And to make that profitability we have to make the strong transformation to make that happen. >> So for profitability there's all kinds of things that go in there, there's higher utilization, there's hopefully everybody buys Teslas so the gas doesn't cost as much for the airplanes. How are you focusing on profitability? 'Cause here we're at Adobe, all the talk's about experience, experience, experience. If I'm flying on your plane, I want to get a good deal and keep everything good but I'm not necessarily that worried about your profitability. >> So let me tell you a little bit about that. If you think about an airline we're just the distance between our customers and their dreams. We're just the distance. So the customer doesn't want to go to security. The customer doesn't want to go to the whole hassle of planning the trip. Our purpose is reducing that distance, reducing that effort, and when we reduce that effort we're going to self-service, we're going to personalize, to make life easier for our customers. That's the basic challenge. And that has to do with three main areas. One, knowing our customer. The other one is, making sure that the value proposal for that customer journey is proper. So that's operational work. And the other one is providing our employees with enough information to make that happen. All of those are working along data, and data to be able to provide a real value proposal to making that happen. The customer has to be in the center of our strategy and that's where we have to be working all the time. And when you do this, it's not about technology, it's about the customer. And being that, about the customer, the strongest challenge is not technology but people, making people change so we that can provide the value proposals to our customers. >> So what are some of the things that you did to enable the experience of my engagement, whether it's electronic or whether it's when I'm talking to that person at the counter, checking in or getting on my flight, how have you helped them provide me a better experience? >> You talk as if it was part of the past. To be honest, it's a journey, we're still working on that. There are several things that we did last year, a whole bunch of things. We changed our app, we changed our website, we changed our interaction with our customers with data. And regarding Adobe, we're here at Adobe, we implemented a whole set of tools. So AEM, the website is a new thing. Regarding Microsoft we implemented a CRM to know about our customers. We changed our app, and the app is like a platform with which we're transforming the customer journey. What we have to do at the end of the game is changing those touch points so that those require less effort from our customer, they're more seamless and we are able to personalize and know in advance what the customer is looking for to provide alternatives. And that makes it more seamless. So we're in that process of doing data-centered decision making to reduce that effort from our customers and make things happen. >> So as you've gone through this journey to date what are some of the surprising things that came up that you just didn't expect at all, on a positive side? And then what were some of the negative things that you didn't know, that were so negative that now you've kind of removed? >> Okay, so I've been here in this business and Avianca just for the last two years, so if you talk about surprises this is my first time in airlines. I wasn't expecting this to be so challenging. >> Well, it's good to come at it from a fresh point of view, absolutely. >> I've been in banking, I've been in telcos. Believe me, there's a huge technical depth, there's a lot of complexity, and bringing this customer information up to the table, it's been challenging. Lots of things going together. Surprises, yeah, we have to work with our employees. We have to transform that culture. We have to move towards a more testing ... Having experiments iterating and learning from that process. And that takes time and that requires a lot change of culture. The other one is being more agile and that's more easily said than done. So making the teams be more collaborative. And working with partners. We decided to choose a handful of partners to make this transformation work. And those partners, that's not one thing that you just plug and play, you have to make it work and that requires a lot of effort. Even if it's big, strong, world-wide, world-level sponsors and partners, it requires engaging and making them work together. At the end it's about people in every part. And making people work together, that's a challenge. That's a challenge. >> You've got the whole gamut too, 'cause you've got the front line people that are directly engaged with the client, whether again it be at the gate agent or on the telephone or processing those things all the way back to the senior management and the operations which I'm sure are not only regulated and very very finely detailed for safety and everything else. So that's got to be hard to try to drive transformation in what was probably a pretty rigid situation. >> It is, that's why you have to choose what to do. And probably you don't know how to do it at the beginning but you know what you want to achieve. And that requires a more iteration way of learning, experimenting and finding a way. That's regarding agility. And that's where you work with partners to also leapfrog and move faster forward unto this. That's where we choose partners as Accenture, Adobe, Microsoft, SAP, and Amadeus. And they're moving us forward unto that. >> So what are some of the ways that you're trying to measure success? What are some of the things you're tracking as you go through this transformation? >> Well, several of them. Let me talk just about a couple of them. One of the things that we have to do is make the buying process easier. We're starting way behind, strong technical depth, and we have to decouple our systems to make those steps that our customer has to do, make them fewer, easier, and changing the whole booking flow. But to do that, we don't have the answer. First we have to decouple the system, the legacy systems, and then we have to learn from our customers. We have to do a lot of A/B testing to see what works better. Test and see if the process is better accepted by our customers, learn from that, probably fail, do it again, iterate it and do it again. And that process we have to engage unto that. The other one is ... So that's one of the areas. But the other one is, how can we make sure that the operational value proposal takes place? Since we have been growing for the last 10 years so much, we started from a local airline to the second biggest airline in Latin America, but that growth is a little bit disorganized and we have to set things up to make it happen. We have to provide a lot more data and connectivity to all our employees at the airports, at the counters, at the call center, and providing them with more customer information to make it happen. >> Right, so you're on that process, so you're starting to deliver new data to the gate agents and the people on the front line? >> Sure. >> So how are they reacting to that? Do they like to be empowered, are they afraid of being empowered, are they saying, "Ah, finally I have the information "in front of me that I can take care of this traveler?" >> So there's not one answer for that. In some cases we empower them and they enjoy a lot and they say, "Hey, finally we got this." For example, we are giving our ... This is a recent project that we launched at the airport. We're providing them data through mobility, making the turnaround of our planes faster, and we're giving them much more data. Before then, they had to call everywhere to find what was happening. Now they have it at their hands, and that's different. So that changes the whole thing and they look forward to that. At other times, we sometimes do mistakes also. We provided more information through the apps to our pilots. They were finding that awesome. But then some of the information that they used to have, we didn't get it. So we have to iterate it and give it and then they start loving it. Regarding our customers, which is the other side, it's not internal employees, we do some things in which we test and sometimes they say, "Oh, that was not what we were expecting." So we have to learn from that. I mean, it's not about making a huge waterfall project. It's about learning in the process, failing, and iterating and making it happen again and again. It's a whole journey. >> We just had our last guest, he talked about trying to move this stuff to the cloud. It's like, first time didn't work, second time didn't work, third time, hey, now it's working. So you don't know until you know, right? And what we hear over and over is as you start this top-level transformation project you uncover a bunch of stuff under the covers that has to be reworked to support what you're trying to do on the front end. >> That's right. >> I assume it's a lot of the same thing that you found? >> You're exactly right, there's a lot of things in that way. On all three areas. Customer, on customer we didn't have customer information, we didn't even have a CRM. So we implemented our CRM at a huge fast pace that we did it, in a year we already had it. The app and the website, we have to totally remake it, and getting more information from that and getting personalized information regarding that. That's technical depth, I was not expecting that to be there. >> So I'm just curious, what was the catalyst of this transformation and this growth? Were you trying to put in systems to support the growth that you did from going from a relatively small domestic airline to an international, or are you trying to set the table for continued growth, to continue on that growth path? That's a pretty aggressive growth path. >> It's a little bit more simple than that and I'm going to be blunt here. Three years ago the board at Avianca was doing a search for a new CEO. That's my boss right now. He came over three years ago. He used to be the president for Microsoft in Latin America. In the interviews they told him a lot of things. And after he was questioned and doing the interview, he said, "Okay, let me say this now. "Are you asking me to make Avianca "a digital company flying airplanes?" And they said, "Yeah, that's exactly right. "That's what we want." So that was the initial pace. That was three years ago. I joined the team two years ago. There was already a vision, and that vision is making things easier and effortless for the customer. That's part of what we're trying to build. And that is before, during, and after the trip. If we are able to do that we're reducing costs, we're making it simpler. The whole process is about being simpler, taking away complexity, making sure that our operations are better, and that's taking away complexity. You can do that through technology also. But again, the biggest challenge is probably not technology. It's a cultural change and it's the leadership required to move on and make our employees, our customers, take advantage of it. >> Bold move by the board and a bold move by the CEO but we hear it all the time. Everybody's a digital company now, it's just what product or service do you happen to wrap it around? So what a great story. >> Thank you. And yeah, again, we got to go more data-centered, we have to know our customer better. If we want to do something personalized the only way is through the data. We have to know in advance what our customers are requesting and trying to make it easier for all of them, and that's the data. >> Well Santiago, thanks for sharing your story. And again congratulations on the keynote shout-out. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> All right. He's Santiago, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Adobe Summit 2019 in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (lively electronic music)