Emirates Group collaborates with OpenAI to accelerate AI adoption and innovation

Dubai, UAE 21 November 2025: Emirates and OpenAI have entered into a strategic collaboration to advance AI adoption and innovation across the airline. 

The collaboration will entail enterprise-wide deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise, supported by tailored AI literacy programmes, technical exploration, and executive strategic alignment designed to embed AI capabilities across the organisation. 

Ali Serdar Yakut, Executive Vice President IT said: "We see enormous potential for AI technology to support our business requirements, helping us tackle complex commercial challenges, strengthening our operations, and enhancing the customer experience. Closely working with OpenAI will make our technology investments both strategic and scalable, enabling us to deliver enhanced value to our employees and customers, fundamentally changing how we innovate, deliver value, and maintain our competitive edge in the industry."

Rod Solaimani, Regional Director, MENA & Central Asia at OpenAI said: "Emirates Group has laid out a bold vision for how AI can transform the future of aviation. With this collaboration, we're proud to help them bring that vision to life - embedding intelligence across their operations, empowering teams with powerful new tools, and reimagining the travel experience for millions of customers."

As part of their work together, Emirates and OpenAI will explore opportunities to introduce practical use cases, develop an internal AI champion network, and establish an AI Centre of Excellence. 

This collaboration will identify key areas for enhancing and expanding AI capabilities across the organisation, covering critical skills, processes and technology needed to power Emirates into the next era.

Emirates stands to gain early access to cutting-edge AI research and emerging breakthroughs, as well as collaboration on government-led innovation projects and accelerators.

Additionally, Emirates and OpenAI will jointly run dedicated leadership sessions to explore practical applications, build sponsorship and advocacy for AI initiatives, and provide leaders with visibility into OpenAI's product roadmap for long-term planning.

OpenAI and Emirates technology teams will also work closely together to optimise integrating OpenAI's models to establish rapid prototyping and deployment best practices and provide sandbox environments to accelerate experimentation across various use cases powered by generative AI.

Emirates is committed to using technology and innovation to lead the way in aviation. The airline's approach aims to create practical and scalable solutions that benefit travellers, communities, the wider industry, and all its brands and businesses.