Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. is going full throttle on agentic artificial intelligence and automation technologies.

The airline is harnessing Databricks Inc.’s data and AI platform to help manage its customer data and flight operations. Databricks recently announced tools for automating agent building and supporting vibe coding, or coding through AI prompts.

Virgin Atlantic Airways’ Richard Masters and Databricks’ Samuel Bonamigo discuss their collaboration.

“What we are using the vibe coding aspect for at the moment is for that kind of prototype design,” said Richard Masters (pictured, right), vice president of data and AI at Virgin Atlantic Airways.  “You could be in workshops and you can just start to talk to your agents, whether it’s ChatGPT or copilot or on the platform as well, and just say, ‘I want to change a field here. I want to change a drop-down here,’ and it just happens. Then you can take it away and really productionize it.”

Masters and Samuel Bonamigo (pictured), senior VP and general manager of EMEA Databricks, spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier at the Databricks’ Data + AI Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the ways in which Databricks’ platform is changing how Virgin Atlantic operates.

How Virgin Atlantic Airways goes on AI autopilot

By enabling vibe coding and other forms of automation, Databricks has allowed a wider range of employees to reap the benefits of AI. At Virgin Atlantic, for example, business analysts can use models to communicate better with engineers and vice versa.

“It’s all about democratization,” Bonamigo explained. “Today, the message is if … you want to try and use Databricks data intelligence platform, let’s do it. It’s free. We talk a lot about the knowledge because we have to democratize and make sure the knowledge on how to leverage the platform and AI goes across the different countries.”

Democratizing access and improving communications has resulted in a faster production cycle for Virgin Atlantic. In particular, Databricks’ serverless Lakebase, which takes a step toward democratizing online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, will help Virgin Atlantic provide real-time responses to thousands of queries at once.

“The great thing now with serverless and with [Unity Catalog] is I can take a data product and go right from the top in the gold right through to the serverless compute, so we can really actually measure ROI,” Masters said. “It makes everything really simple as a calculation for me and for my CFO.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Databricks’ Data + AI Summit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE