Elevate Aviation Group CEO Greg Raiff: Use AI for Pricing and Operations, Not for Post-Booking Customer Service
Why It MattersThe argument frames a dividing line in private aviation between AI for back-office pricing and monitoring versus client service, as private equity investment accelerates and cost engineering threatens to hollow out service.
Greg Raiff, CEO of Elevate Aviation Group, the parent company of Elevate Jet and Private Jet Services, argues in an opinion piece that businesses are wrongly treating cost efficiency as the same thing as productivity and are using AI to remove human contact at the moment customers need it most. He follows an earlier piece about a 48-hour stranding at JFK, during which 143 people were affected, and describes commercial aviation as having optimized away the human layer between a problem and its resolution over roughly 25 years of mergers.
Raiff says Elevate Jet itself relies on AI. He credits its proprietary pricing engine, built on 30 years of aviation data, with a meaningful part of the company's growth this year. He says the company uses AI relentlessly for tasks a machine should do: pricing a flight instantly, watching weather and slot times across a network, and flagging a maintenance pattern before it becomes a delay. However, he says the company has never used AI to replace human interaction once a client relationship exists, and will not do so.
He also notes that private equity is moving into private aviation at a pace he has not seen in 35 years in the industry, and that the economics of many such deals reward the kind of cost engineering that gutted commercial airline service. His conclusion is that the businesses that succeed over the next decade will be those that know where to stop automating, not those that automate the most.
Elevate Jet is an on-demand private aviation operator certified under FAA Part 91 and Part 135, with ARGUS Platinum and Wyvern Wingman ratings, offering instant booking through its platform.
