Amazon Web Services Inc.’s re:Invent conference this week was the coming-out party for new CEO Adam Selipsky as he takes the reins that were once held by now Amazon.com Inc. CEO Andy Jassy, and I found his keynote to be much different from Jassy’s.

Not better per se, but it had a notable shift away from product to purpose, even if there was a lot of product news built into the keynote. The underlying theme to his keynote was what Selipsky (pictured) described as “Pathfinding,” where innovative businesses can challenge the status quo to find new way of doing things. In some ways, this is akin to Marc Benioff using “Trailblazing” as the underlying theme of his presentations at Dreamforce.

During his keynote, Selipsky gave some historical examples of people such as Hank Luisetti, who invented the layup in the 1930s to change the way basketball is played, and Florence Nightingale, who used data and some rudimentary analytics to understand the causes of death for soldiers in the mid-1800s and lowered their mortality rate.

The more modern and technical example I wanted to highlight, though, was the innovation United Airlines has brought to the travel industry. This was meaningful to me because I just experienced the benefits of digital travel can bring last week.

Joining Selipsky onstage was Linda Jojo, executive vice president of technology and chief digital officer of United Airlines. She said the company recognized that travel, particularly international, is highly complex, since each country has different rules and requirements. As someone who has travelled to Dubai, the U.K. and Canada in recent months, I can certainly attest to the messiness of traveling today.

“Our team knew we could do better when international flying restarted,” she said during her presentation. “The team built a machine learning model to address the travel chaos.”

The company uses Amazon S3 storage to pull in COVID test forms. Its data is categorized with Amazon DynamoDB and the forms go through Amazon Textract and SageMaker. “These models are continuing to improve, but we’ve automatically validated two-thirds of all documents and over 75% of all COVID test forms for over 4 million customers,” she noted.

Over Thanksgiving I went to Mexico and flew United there and Alaska Airlines back and the experience was night and day. The process Jojo described above is a feature in the United mobile app called the Travel-Ready Center.

Prior to checking in, the app has all information needed for countries and has you upload information, such as your passport image, COVID test and vaccination status. The AI engine scans it and gives you an “approved” status. Once everything is approved, we could check in, get our boarding passes via mobile device and zip through the airport boarding. We also enjoyed some margaritas at the swi-up bar.

Returning to the U.S. on Alaska Airlines was a much different experience. I couldn’t get my boarding pass prior and had to have a physical one printed at the airport kiosk.

Once through security, I had to go to the gate and wait for an agent to show up. After that, we had to have our COVID tests manually inspected, which got us a green sticker on our boarding pass. Then we had to fill out an attestation, which was three pages long, stating we have had our test and are vaccinated. That form was folded and stapled to our boarding pass. When we boarded, the paper attestation form was removed from the boarding pass and placed on a stack of others.

It’s important to note that with the United Travel-Ready Center, all information I required was in there, including what kind of tests we need. Because I travel a lot, I’m familiar with which country requires a PCR versus an antigen, but not everyone is.

With the United app, if we uploaded the wrong kind of test, we would have been notified and could correct it. With the Alaska process, the onus is on us to figure it out and we would not have known we had an incorrect test until we got to the gate.

This is the value being a pathfinder that Selipsky referred to. United challenged the status quo and used the available AWS tools to find a better way. Alaska accepted the norm, which resulted in a poor experience that is manually intensive and fraught with risk.

This overarching theme of pathfinding for the keynote was a good one, particularly in today’s environment. I hope to see this kind of messaging become common with AWS versus jumping right into the technology.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE