The $8+ Billion Partnership: How Delta and Amex Redefined the Business of Flying | Titans and Disruptors

Delta is not a low cost airline. We can't win by trying to provide the cheapest. We have to be able to win by providing the best. In many respects Delta Airlines owns this guys. It leads in global airline market cap, domestic market share, and premium customer satisfaction rankings. This is the same company that was bankrupt just two decades ago. Delta CEO Ed Bastion played a central role in the airlines turnaround to become the most profitable airline in the US. When you're at the bottom and you're looking up, you don't know how deep you have to go. Bastion has been with Delta for almost 30 years and as the CEO for almost 10, which makes him the longest serving active CEO among major US airlines. Within the turbulent airline industry, one that's sensitive to everything from passing tiktok trends to international war. Bastion is steered with a steady hand. He's led Delta to expansive growth in premium travel, fueled in part by a lucrative MX partnership and significant investment in branding and experiences. Only one in five people in the world have ever been on an airplane. It's one way to make it affordable, available, accessible, sustainable. Internally, Bastion prioritizes his people. The company has shared billions with its employees during an annual profit sharing celebration and Delta regularly ranks unfortuance 100 best companies to work for. I sat down with Ed at Delta's home base in Atlanta to learn how he leads and worry plans on taking the company in the future. I'm Allison Chantel and this is portion 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry. We'll be back with Ed after a message from our sponsor. Fortune spoke with Deloitte US CEO Jason Gersardis on maximizing AI agents and what CEO should consider as they assess and prioritize use cases for AI. This is on the topic of every CXO conversation I'm a part of and I think the thought process has to be looking for high impact areas that may not be necessarily the most glamorous or high profile functional areas but are right for automation and use of this technology to create efficiencies as well as innovation. And over time, AI agents will be also in customer facing and growth oriented domains. In our case, Deloitte, we're using it within our finance organization looking at very mundane processes like expense management and working capital management. We're seeing other organizations using in call centers and with software development that can be automated. What are the key elements for successfully implementing AI agents? Comes down to intentionality and so I think that intentionality in going functional area by functional area in concert with business and IT leadership on enterprise. It needs to be a mainstream business planning effort that's budgeted, that's KPIs are developed and there's real accountability for actual business outcomes and impact because of agente capabilities. Ed, thank you so much for being with us today. It's pleasure as always. You're bit of an unlikely CEO on paper in terms of running an airline because you hadn't even stepped foot on an airplane till you were 25. That has changed quite a bit I am sure. And you are the oldest and nine children. You grew up in a house with 12 people, one and a half bathrooms, fighting your sisters for the bathroom slot for two minutes at a time. How did that prepare you for leadership for everything you're doing today? Of course, well, thanks for having us. Well, it wasn't as as crazy as that might sound. It felt normal. That's all we knew. But yeah, I think there's the oldest of a nine in a large family and my parents set of expectations of standards for all of us and as the oldest, you're intended to set the bar and keep the bar high for your siblings. People are looking at you. People are looking up to you and you're first to go through, you know, whether it's going to high school, going to college, getting a job. Fortunately, all nine of us are still around. So we still have our pecking water sort of. You still always jokingly or for a week, it feels our own baseball team with nine of us. So you get involved in organization, you get involved in kind of trying to push others to to make things happen and keep people together. Before you got to Delta, I know you went to Pepsi, which is a bit of a finishing school for CEOs, it seems. There's actually 12 fortune 500 CEOs that went through Pepsi. We were in an article a few years ago about just like, what's in the water at Pepsi? I'm curious how that experience shaped you and got you prepared to step into a C-suite role when you finally arrived at Delta. Well, I graduated in accounting, small schools, St. Bonabenture and upstate New York. Thank you. Went to Syracuse. You're on a mistake. And so rivals in basketball, at least, I went right to work. I didn't have the money or the the patients to get any postgraduate education and started working at Pricewaterhouse. And I realized that I wanted to move further in my career. I would need to get some additional education and I didn't have the means to pay for it at the time to reallocate to it. So when Pepsi came calling, I found it interesting. And so I decided to jump on it. Pepsi is a fascinating culture. It's about speed. It's about decision making. It's a street business up and down the street, the products that they sell, whether it's beverage or snacks. I was pretty much in the international space. So I was traveling all the time around the world. You're surrounded by a great talent. They understood that talent is going to win in the marketplace. And so they were always out recruiting, constantly recruiting, bringing talent in. It's one of the only places I've ever been to where they tell you when you start, you're probably not going to retire here because it's a talent factory. So you learn what you can. You grow and some people stay, but many people take what they have and they go test their wares in another industry. And since I was in travel, someone told me at one point, I should consider working for an airline because I'm on a plane all the time. And it's that kind of made sense. And who incidentally enough, six months later, I got a call from Delta and here I am today. So, but it's a fascinating company. You work with great people. You had found a huge amount of fraud at a client when you were a price bother has Cooper with J Walter Thompson. We're just 24 years old. People went to jail over this. I mean, so very numbers focused. I'm curious how that numbers background has served you, even when you think about when you arrived at Delta, the company was in a very different state. I think I grew up with a lot of curiosity. My parents always taught us that we should be able to aspire to greatness in trying to figure out how to do that. And as a result, curiosity and learning was something that was really important to me. And when I got to that accounting task at the advertising company, they had something there that was kind of large that I couldn't figure it out. And I didn't know if it was just me and I just kept digging in and digging in and digging in. And eventually, it was like, wasn't what it was supposed to be. And you know, you're a lot of people got in trouble. And I had a very early age learned that you can never put something down until you really understand it. And so there's value in that. I look back on it now. It's a long time ago. There's no question. It got me to a different place in my mind as to what I could do. Delta struggled in the early 2000s. The company was over $20 billion in debt weighed down by high fuel costs and decreasing travel following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Frustrated with company leadership, fashion briefly quit Delta in 2004. But he returned as CFO only months later at the request of then Delta CEO Jerry Grinstine. That same year, a bastion's urging Delta filed for bankruptcy. It was one of the largest bankruptcies in the US history. But the airline industry is often volatile. More than 160 airlines have declared bankruptcy in the past few decades. And when Delta filed in 2005, it was the third major airline to enter chapter 11 after the 2001 attacks. When you arrived at Delta, you were here for a bit and then you left for six months and you came back. I think you returned at like half your salary. But one of the things you said to the CEO who was bringing you back was we have to file for bankruptcy. I'm curious why come back at half your salary and why come back to a company that you felt needed to go bankrupt? Well, it was a company that I knew had a lot of potential. And I saw that there were a lot of strategies that weren't playing out well. The employees of the company were great to front line, but they weren't being led with the type of confidence and the values driven goals that I thought were appropriate for a company in terms of what we do. And so I left because my voice wasn't being heard at the leadership levels of the company. There was just chaos candidly. It was after 9/11. There was a lot of confusion. A lot of airlines were having trouble. So it wasn't as if it was only Delta. Sometimes your voice is actually louder when you leave them when you stay. And that woke up the board, woke up the CEO. And he came after me a few times and I wouldn't come back until he had made the decisions that they were going to actually take bankruptcy, which was not a statement of failure, was a statement that the law gives you to get a second shot at life and try to utilize the application of it to revive our company. Unfortunately, they finally agreed with me. When they decided to do it, they brought me back. I led the restructuring as the CFO and 20 years later, you know, the top airline in the world. So it gave you a second chance. And it was something that was a tool that we needed to avail ourselves to. I want to ask you about that turnaround playbook. It's really remarkable to take a company in the CFO position and eventually the CEO position to take one that was so distressed to now America's most profitable airline. It's such a swing and yes, it was 20 years in the making. But when you look [BLANK_AUDIO] back on that period. Like, what were the key decision points and things that happened in your turnaround playbook? The two most important things, one was that we needed to get out of being seen as a commodity. Back then, when you asked people, "Why did they choose an airline for their specific flight?" 80% of the time it would be, whoever had the lowest price. And then another 20% would, because it got me faster to my destination. And brand was almost nothing. Loyalty plans were kind of an afterthought. Today, if you ask people why they choose Delta, 80% would say, "Because it's Delta." Because the experience, the brand, the confidence I have in that company, that's my airline. And 20% are other things. So it was just a total flip. And so that was the most important thing, getting paid for the great service that our people do. And secondly, giving our people reasonable leave and giving them the responsibility to go make it work. It's a complicated business. There's a lot of decisions, a lot of changes that are always, you know, we're confronted with. You have to let your people know that you're behind them, that you're supporting them. You're giving the tools. You're putting them out front. Rather than the management being out front, we want our people to be out front. And that's the one thing I've tried with our leadership team to be that we're serving our people. We're not, they are serving us. We're serving their people. We're not obsessing on customers per se at the leadership levels, because we want to obsess on our own people so that they can obsess on you as a customer. And when your people know that you've got their back, amazing things can happen. That had been lost and bringing that back and getting the confidence and trust back was really key. I have to congratulate you because you've been on our world's most admired list as a company and also on our great places to work, ranking for a number of years. And it's a testament to the culture that you've built here at ZELTA and the people first nature of what you do it. I think there's about 100,000 employees who now work for ZELTA. When I look back at that period and your turnaround playbook, I think definitely putting the culture in people first has been key. The move into luxury, getting more dollars per se is key. But there's also two big programs that came out of that kind of distressed period. One is a remarkable AMX partnership. They were really integral in that moment where you needed a partner and they helped. And the other is this profit sharing program that you created for employees. I think you devised and executed as a CFO. That still stands today. And for people to understand the size and scale of it, over $11 billion have been paid to your employees over the last decade. That's pretty unheard of in the Fortune 500. There are other smaller profit sharing, but nothing like that. So can you walk me through the genesis of that profit sharing? I understand why you needed to get the people on your team now, but you're also working with shareholders. They probably want to see some of that money come back to the company, not necessarily to your employees. So how? When we went through the restructuring, we had to make a lot of hard decisions. Yeah. Resulted in large amounts of pay cuts, loss of jobs, loss of benefits, loss of pensions in certain cases. And when you're at the bottom and you're looking up, you don't know how deep you have to go. There was always concern with our people saying, yeah, we understand we have to make sacrifices. But how do we know what you're going to do with the money that we're going to give you the concessions? That they're going to be deployed? In fact, because they're making an investment in the company in terms of your turnaround. And I said to them, well, the great failsafe measure is when we are profitable and we were far from it at the time, you'll get the first returns on that. You'll get a 15% effective return on profits for as long as we're around them. This is not like a short-term thing because they created and in a 15% investment return. I thought it was a pretty good idea to get people excited about it. And you got to time people didn't think too much about it because it wasn't paying anything. And maybe the first year of $100 million distributed across, large still wasn't a whole lot of money. But eventually it became real dollars. And I think the first time that we paid a billion dollars was maybe 12, 14 years ago. And we were just stripping a billion dollars to your people. That's like changing money for a lot of people. I got anywhere between four to eight weeks at different times of a pay. But they never knew to count on a year to year. And it's a great alignment with your shareholders because our customers win because our employees are doing a great job for them. And the better job they do serving our customers, the better job our shareholders are going to do in terms of the returns into delta. And it's paid back to the employees through the profit share ice cream. So years ago I used to get a lot of pushback when we started getting into some big numbers from shareholders. Why are you doing this? This is now, this is our money you're giving away. I would tell you if I was to announce, and I'm not, that we were going to end the profit sharing or change the profit sharing formula, the shareholders would be the first people that would come after me. Because they see that the sharing of success is just core to the culture, core to the competitive advantage that the delta has in the culture and the people. The numbers you mentioned are with that profit sharing already included. The most profitable airline that pays more profit sharing than all of the other airlines put together and still has the highest profits as a result of that. So that circle, that virtuous circle we talk about, you know, taking care of the people so they can take care of the customers who then reward our shareholders with their loyalty is, is kind of, way out in front of them to say. You feel like other CEOs grasp that? It does seem like you're on an island here. I haven't seen other CEOs saying that. In fact, they're saying, well, I can get more efficiency. I can keep more to the company and maybe not spread out the wealth. Well, we're people business. We're experienced business. We're a business where we do hard things. It's a technically challenging business. We have a lot of seniority in the company here 30 years, but I'm actually not one of the more senior people in the company of many people in 40, 50, up to 60 years of service. And the reason why is they love the company. And you always want to inspire love for your brand, for your customers, but you can never get it if your people don't love who they work for and they don't love that brand even more. During his tenure as the EO, Baston has established himself as a devoted employee first leader. He refused to make furloughs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite industry wide shifts towards AI, he frequently reinforces Delta's commitment to always put people first. In a fortune-cover story on Baston last year, our senior editor at large, Sean Tully, described him as the least stressed CEO he had covered and said no CEO seemed to be having more fun. I think the first time you ever heard that you could be the CEO was a surprise. I gather your predecessor mentioned in a newspaper article, yeah, Baston could be my successor and you were like, wait, what? You forgot to tell me. I forgot to tell you when you told the public. So I'm curious what that moment was like for you and was that your first time thinking, huh, maybe the CEO thing could be in my future. Not everybody knows when or if they want to be a CEO. I wasn't aspiring to be the CEO. I was happy with the job I had. I was challenged by the role. I was candid, probably intimidated by the thought of all the extra things that I have to do, doing things like this. For example, that was not missing my nature growing up. And the more I thought about it, I understood the responsibility it carried, the accountability, the privilege. It's a privilege that pressure is a privilege. And I wanted to make a difference. And did you find there was any skills gap you had to overcome between going from a CFO to CEO? Sometimes CFOs can make great CEOs and it's an easy transition. Sometimes whether it's the numbers focus and they haven't learned leadership or empathy or some sorts of things, it cannot be a great fit. What was the skill gap that you had to overcome? What was the hardest part? I think there's a lot that has to overcome. I don't think there's any such thing as an easy transition into the CEO chair no matter where you've been because I was the president of the company for eight years prior to become the CEO. So I've been pretty close to this for almost 20 years. Even as president sitting in the CEO chair, it's different. There's a lot of things that feel different, whether you're dealing with DC, whether you're the last line of defense in terms of having to make a decision and people look to you, you know, all eyes are a new in terms of what's happening, whether it's the media. People don't want to hear from the number two or three person they want to hear from the person right with your international relationships dealing with dignitaries and the like. In front of so many for us, 100,000 people constantly and being willing to put your face on your brand, it's a very different feel. It takes a few years to get comfortable. I'll be honest with you. I know it did for me and then talk to a number of young CEOs and folks they'll call looking for, you know, inside and help and some mentorship from time to time. You know, you got to get comfortable in the chair. You got to make sure it's your chair. And a lot of times you're in the chair, you're still not certain that you've earned it, you because you feel you're still in the chair. You still have a posture syndrome? You can't possibly still. No, no, but when you're in the first handful of years, you're still not certain you're trying to prove yourself that you actually deserve the seat you're sitting in because stakeholder management is different today too. You know, been at this now 10 years. 10 years ago it was complicated. Now I think it's much more complicated. And so how do you deal with so many different constituencies that always want your time, your attention and how do you balance that? How has your communication style evolved? I love one thing you said about your private sister too was he recommended like get a private phone, get a private email, don't go out in public. This is like, blunk her down and you've done the opposite. I can attest that you. We'll respond to an email in minutes, and that's not just me. It's for all of your employees, for your customers, for anyone, a very public email. What has your style been in communicating externally, but also really internally? - Well, I want people to feel like we care. I want our people to know that I care about them, or leadership cares about them. I certainly want our customers to feel that. I want our community to feel that. I want our investors to feel that. And it would always frustrate me when people would say, "I just can't get through to a customer service line. I can't do this. I can't do that." And I finally, one point, this was during COVID. I saw people having a hard time just contact me. Here's my email. And people said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah." And people have been using it for years. It always allows me to stay in touch. And I, yes, I see every email that comes to me, I can't personally respond. Every single one of them, I've got a whole team of people that sit behind me that I know. I feel like sometimes I'm more a point guard. And I'm receiving it. And I'm giving it to someone who's more subject matter expert, whether someone in our executive care department, whether someone in our maintenance team, whether it's dealing with a pilot matter, or whatnot. I have a team of people that, when they receive it from me, they know to take care of it quickly and efficiently and effectively just as I would, because I can't possibly deal with the thousands and thousands I get every single day. But I see them all. And by the way, I do respond to a fair number of them as well. By seeing everything, I think I have developed a sense of peace with my role. It's a fast-moving industry. It's hard. People talk about it as one of the more challenging industries to operate in. People say, how do you stay calm when you have so much swirling around you at all times? I know what's happening. There's nothing in my business that's happening that I don't hear about from somebody. Because people know I want to hear. It's not just they can tell me. They choose to tell me. And as a result of that, I feel like there's a pace and a rhythm I'm always constantly in sync with. And I don't ever need to worry about a missing something or having to look for something. It finds me. And it gives me the freedom to continue to stay ahead of me. It's a weird use of technology that people would say, either it's something that would drive you crazy or something that actually is liberating. I find it somewhat liberating. I mean, you've gotten Delta through some hard times in terms of any 100-year-old company. And congratulations, you had sort of 100 last year, a huge milestone. There's going to be, can your death moments really scary moments? And one of them dug yourself out financially in the early 2000s. But COVID was a huge moment. Difficult for you as a leader, very scary for the employees. I know you have said you felt like Job in the Bible. It was a tough time for you personally. Your mother, I'm so sorry, had passed. All revenue basically seemed like it was evaporating overnight. I mean, you had to refund a bunch of customers or trips. They'd never go on. And you really didn't want to furlough your employees. And you somehow got half of your team to willingly go without pay for over a year, I think, to get through that period. How are you corralling this team to beast selfless, to their peers, to help Delta in times of need? What is your internal communication to people to get them to do these hard things? Well, we talk a lot in business about culture. We talk a lot about strategy. If people always think the strategy is the harder thing. It's the more brilliant thing. It's the more scientific thing. It's the only the very best or strategist. I tell you, that's not true. The very best are people that have a great culture and that invest in their culture. And yeah, we can do strategy as well as anybody. Our progress shows that. But investing in your culture and your people is by far a harder thing, the more important thing. And I think the longer lead time that you have and the alignment of that culture from the top of the company down to the front line, everybody knows what we're doing, how we're doing it and what that strategy is. And that culture is really strong. And the DNA within our company is really strong. So when COVID hit, it was a shock. We had no idea that to prepare for it. We had built such a reservoir of confidence and trust that our people had in the company that they were leaning into us and they were saying, whatever decision you take were behind you. Just tell us where to go. Which was hard because you're trying to figure out what where to go. But when I knew that we needed to find a way to reduce the cost because we had no revenue, you can't possibly run a business with all your people and no revenue coming in. Even in my leadership team, I said, we're going to try to do this without for a long people. People told me I was crazy. And I was very visible when I was talking because we did a lot of these video chats to my own people. I said, I have a vision of doing this without for a long, which would be incredible. And we've for a lot of plenty of times in the past with bankruptcy and other events that had happened. And I said, you got to stay with us in order to do it. And we came up with this approach where if people volunteer, we'd keep their jobs, we'd keep their benefits. We'd let them travel. It was the greatest time to travel because no one else was traveling so you could sit wherever you want on the plane and it felt like flying private at some points. And half our people volunteered to give up their jobs without for a living, a single person. We got through it without for a living, a single person. They knew also how important it was for our younger people who couldn't afford to give up their jobs to stay and allow them to continue running the business. And that to me, still to this day is one of the things that how we did it, I'm still not quite sure, but there was a real vulnerability when you were talking and asking people, people could see, people were with us. I was doing these video chats nearly every single day with our people, tens of thousands of people around the world who always tune in in a certain time of the day to watch. And to hear what, it was like the new chapter every day as you think about that, what did we learn, how are we doing it, what do I need people to think about. And they said, yes, I'm in. And they all started to raise their hands and we made it. We made it. Delta's longstanding partnership with AMX played a significant role in the company's bankruptcy recovery. Delta received a $1 billion boost for AMX in 2008. And in the following years, the partnership has soared to become the most lucrative credit card partnership in the industry. According to Bastion, AMX's Delta Co-branded card spending approaches about 1% of US GDP each year. Delta earned more than $8 billion for AMX in 2025, which makes up over 10% of Delta's total revenue. The other thing I want to talk about was the American Express Partnership. I'm curious how you have nurtured and cultivated that to become really great on both sides. I believe it was $8 billion that was paid to Delta from AMX last year for the credit card that you two have together. And that's like 10% of revenue for Delta. It's significant. And that has been a long-term partnership. I think you renewed in 2019 for another 10-year deal. How does that partnership work? And how has it tested time? 20 years ago, that was paying maybe 500 million. If that was still a lot of money, but it's nowhere close to the many billions that we received today. As Delta's brand started to move, and people started to see it as a premium brand, as a differentiated experience, AMX was critical to that, because we see AMX as the premium credit card in the business. It has a higher value proposition. The customer loyalty is greater. And so the attachment, and it's an exclusive attachment in the US between Delta and AMX Express, gave us a partner that we could put both our brands together, and we both lift each other up. Those are the most successful relationships when someone one brand has taken advantage of another, or feeding off of another when both brands legitimately raise up. Years ago, many years ago, we would have difficulties with AMX, because we could never figure out whose customer it was. AMX thought it was their customer, because they had the credit card. Delta thought it was our customer, because we're providing the experience 10 years or so ago. We got together, and Steve Square used to see all that AMX, not just close partner, but close friend. We got to say, it's our customers. And let's stop fighting about who's getting what size slice, and figure out how do we make the pie bigger. And if you focus on making the pie bigger, they'll be plenty to share for each of us, because it would always be a lot of negotiations and squabbling about to make this investment, what do we get from it? We spend all of our time now thinking how do we make it bigger. Today, Delta is by far American Express' largest distribution of cards, 10% of AMX's worldwide billings are on the Delta card. And in the US, 30% of their US consumer spend for all of AMX is on the Delta card. That's making the pie bigger. And as a result of that, that's what's funding the growth we've had. And even though we're the largest distribution outlet, we're growing faster than any of the other distribution outlets they have at a double digit clip still today. Wow. I know you're not a credit card CEO per se, but you definitely have a strong vantage point and view into how credit card companies work. President Trump recently suggested the idea that we should have a 10% cap on interest rates for credit cards. I'm curious what you think about that. It would impact Delta somewhat, I would imagine, in terms of if AMX takes a hit, you guys would take a hit. Why should credit card interest rates ever be more than 10%? Well, that's probably a better question for the credit card companies, but when you look at the economics for the cards, when you look at the risk that the cards provide and give access to credit, particularly to the lower end of the income strata, I think it's pretty clear that if there was a pretty sizable. financial hit to the credit card companies eventually would come back in terms of reducing credit availability. So, well, it sounds like a great idea on paper to maybe give people some relief. I think it potentially could have a very significant adverse consequence in terms of stranding credit availability and meeting only the the rich could actually afford to have a card. So, it's something the credit card companies I know are discussing and I'm confident we'll come out to a good solution on that. Well, as you mentioned, the card is very successful and a lot of it comes back to the fact that Delta flyers seem very loyal and this is something you've deliberately done over the last 10 plus years. You went away from cheap seats focus and you went for more of the luxury feel, the premium feel, the loyalty feel. I want to dig into a little bit about how you've built that feeling where now you're getting 20% more revenue per seat than other airlines. What goes into creating that brand of trust and loyalty? Well, we started this journey probably 15 years ago, this decomoditization, which is what it was originally called now. It's a premium strategy and we said if we were ever going to succeed, we need it to get paid for what we do. We have to be able to win by providing the best and our economics are geared towards the top line growth, not necessarily trying to make the middle line or the expenses work for the for the bottom line. To do that, you have to start with making certain that customer see you as a premium experience and how could you be a premium experience if your reliability is in the very best in class. And our reliability can't really was not best in class and we had very nice people that apologized nicely. They weren't delivering the expectations of our customers. So we spent a lot of time and money for a number of years making certain that we had the very best reliability, the lowest cancellation rates, the best on time rates, the lowest amount of of missandal bags, never lose bags, which is misplaced in front of time to time. But we always find them quickly and like they're truly there's some lost bags around. They're there's some, but you know, we do a really good job of not doing that. We don't deny boarding in voluntarily and all these things that are just fundamental tenants of good customer strategy. We wanted to be best in class and we started measuring them and improving in year after year after year. And after about five years of this, customers would come to me say, I'm noticing something different. You people seem to be happier. The service level seemed to be better. You know, people are actually enjoying the experience rather than enduring the experience. And what are you doing to make this happen? And it says, well, we're not doing anything different than we've been doing for years. It takes time at scale to show all that because you can't just do it one day or one month or one year. You did to do it every hour of every day. And that's what our people have done. And then when we got there and we've been at the top for quite a number of years of the reliability stats in our industry, then you could start layering on higher quality experiences because you have the baseline to do that. You can't start there. You have to go by building it. And so the premium seating, the bringing more sweets into the planes, particularly for international, the Delta One experience, American Express, all of that was built on a strategy of a strong foundation that give people what they need. And they're willing to pay for it. So no longer are people looking at what's going to get me the lowest price. And we have strategies for people that want the lowest prices called basic economy. But people want to get the best experience and want to get best value for money. And that's where we went, value for money. As a 101 year old company, Delta is the oldest active U.S. airline. What started as an aerial crop-dusting operation in Macon, Georgia now serves over 20 million customers a year out of its Atlanta headquarters. Now Delta is planning for the next 100 years. The company recently closed a $330 million investment in Canada-based WestJet. And at the end of 2025, Delta rolled out its new AI power-dassistant Delta concierge. A few years ago, Delta invested $60 million in JoeB aviation, a company currently working on launching an all-electric air taxi. I think AI is the comm recession happening right now. You're such a people-centered company. I'm curious how you're looking at navigating this AI future. I believe you think we're in an AI bubble to some extent, but I think we could probably both agree that the underlying technology is there and very strong. And it's certainly as capable of doing jobs like customer service, all sorts of stuff. So I'm curious how you're communicating with your team about what's ahead, what technology means for them, really truly and honestly, and how you're thinking about using it moving forward. I do believe the technology is powerful. And I also do know that there's a lot of skepticism. There's a lack of trust. And I think while all the attention is being paid as to how amazing the technology is, not a lot of people are talking about how important it is to make certain that change management and building trust and confidence in deploying the technology is even more important. And that's the harder thing. That's the far harder thing. And so from my perspective, I want to make certain that this technology to extend we deploy it is enabling our people to do an even better job of winning in the marketplace. That's whether solving problems quicker, being able to provide new opportunities for growth, trying to understand how can we think about areas of our business, whether it's in maintenance, our scheduling departments, our reservations, our app. All these things come up instantly and start thinking about, wow, we can be a very different place. But if you don't know who you are, you don't know what drives your business success. If you start thinking that the technology is driving your success, at least as an airline, you're going to fail. It's people. It's people that deploy the technology. It's people that serve people that makes sense. I'm not getting on any planes that are being flown by AI. Okay, I'm not. They're going to be two pilots in that cockpit, at least two on that plane. And for like the long haul or for the long haul. Yeah. I mean, that's not going to be that's not our strategy, by the way. And I think the biggest challenge we're facing today is not the technology at all. It's the trust and the confidence and the safeguards. This is something that people have to adapt. We're not going to add as a company put our people in harm's way by saying this technology is going to take their role. It may change the role. It will change rules. But we then have to redeploy talent to give them more time to serve, which I think would be great in the airports and think about all the additional use that we have in terms of where we can go. So the technology is in the background. It's not at the forefront. And it allows our people to get more in front of people. As you're thinking through how AI will transform your industry and your company, who are you talking to about it? Like how are you making these decisions? Who are you seeking expertise from? We're doing a lot of learning. We're doing a lot of listening. It's really important. There's a lot of people who want to talk. There's not enough people. I think they're really trying to understand and connect in the dots. One of the things that's confusing, sitting in the CEO chair is the technologist themselves will tell you in six months everything will be different again. So how do you know when to plant and decide where you're going to go? So we're doing a lot of projects, pilots trying to try to understand what the technology can be. One thing for Delta, I never talk about it as artificial, always talking about as augmented intelligence. Because it's technology that's going to make our people's jobs easier, more efficient, smarter. But we're a big data company. We've been a big data company for many, many years, decades. We had some of the original big data applications were in the airline industry. And so when we think about AI, it's not something that's intimidating to us because we do hard things, but we're actually excited to make our jobs potentially easier and then allocate more and more of our people to service rather than trying to solve problems. How do you think things like generative AI and other advanced technologies will change the flying experience from a customer perspective? I don't think it's going to change it. I mean, if deployed properly, it should make it maybe more efficient, more reliable. You think about, just think the atmosphere, your ability to better predict turbulence, better understand efficient flow patterns. I can tell you one place it could do an awful lot of good. It's going to take a long time. So how do we deal with their traffic control and congestion and all the challenges that we have in the ATC environment? That would be an amazing deployment. I think that would do more, in terms of helping our customers have quicker travel, more efficient travel than candidly, most any other deployment of the technology that I can think about. We've talked in the past. Today, it takes longer to fly between Atlanta and New York than it did in the 1950s, when we launched that route. It's insane. All that technology investment that we put in AI is not going to change that. Let's it's focused on how do you unlock the sky? In terms of other innovations and things you're working on, and there's a lot around sustainability and green flights. Where are we in that future? How likely do you think that is? What kinds of things are you working on to get us closer? That's a long, long road. And we're making good progress on that. Jet fuel is, unfortunately, we don't have a great replacement for jet fuel. And it is 90% of our footprint is the fossil fuel that we burn. We're working with a lot of communities and a lot of government support in different ways, whether it's biofuels or getting customers that are like minded to think about this thing differently to be able to deploy the technologies. But it's going to take [BLANK_AUDIO] many, many years, but we have no choice. We don't want our customers to have to choose between seeing the world and saving the world, as we like to say. We need to do both, and that's where we're spending our time. - And what about, for something fun, I know you've invested in Joby flying taxis at airports. Is that likely to happen in the next couple of years, do you think? - I do think so. I think you will see Joby in the sky in the next couple of years. It's not gonna change what we do at Delta. There are small planes for six people to an aircraft, but it will change the experience for people. Well, first of all, they're all electric powered. There's no noise. It will take you from your home over time to where you wanna go. And airport is a great use case for the product. When you think about whether it's New York or even here in Atlanta, it can take you more time to get to the airport, to get through the airport, to get on your seat than the flight itself. We can unlock that, and we can get people, through to their destinations, Quiver. - Amazing. You have been the CEO of Delta for quite a while, and you've been with the company for even longer. But I've heard you say that your role as CEO is to really try and think five to 10 years ahead of where the company currently is, to be strategically planning how you're gonna lead it. So when you look out five to 10 years from now, what's on the horizon? What are you focused on right now? - Two things come to mind. First is our continued push globally. As a very, very large international airline, we're still seeing more as a US carrier than a true global carrier. And I would hope over the next 10 to 20 years that would continue to shift more on the international front. We're continuing to push and grow and expand our franchise there. So thinking about the partnerships, thinking about the geographies, thinking about how you're gonna win in the marketplace. Different marketplaces than we've historically been is really top of mind for me. The second technology, technology is moving at a lightning speed. It can be blinding at times, but if you have an idea where you want the technology to take you rather than what the technology wants to do to you, I think you can get ahead of it. - Well, you've now been a Delta for over 25 years in the C-suite roles for a lot of them. You could answer this better than anyone, but what is the top advice you would give for someone who thinks maybe they want to be a leader someday, maybe they want to be a CEO someday of a Fortune 500. What's the best advice you could give? - Now my best advice is to make certain that you're taking care of the people that got you there and you're continuing to do that. Do a great job at what you have in front of you. I never aspired to be the CEO, and I would tell you that most of the great CEOs that I know never aspired to be the great CEO. We talk about in leadership the importance of confidence and drive and energy and vision. But there's also a really important attribute and that's humility. The willingness to actually listen more than you talk to be able to make certain that you have an appreciation for what people do to relate to people. The only this fast-paced environment we have, which technology continues to accelerate, the relation skills are getting lost. And people want to do business with people still. They want to do business with people that they trust, that care about them, and that's where I think real value is. And as a leader, it's so important. And it sounds maybe a little fashion. People look at that when I talk about that. I'm not necessarily trying to give the cutting-edge experience. The cutting-edge opportunities are out there. But understanding what leadership is about people. It's about leading people. And that will get you further than anything you could ever do. Well, Ed, thank you so much for spending time with us. Take it, Allison.