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Three former Oliver Wyman executives with aviation, technology and technical operation experience launched a startup called Zymbly (a play on the word simply) that designed an AI assistant to expedite documentation and administration for aircraft maintenance technicians.
This comes at a time of a global maintenance technician shortage and growing commercial aviation fleet, so simplifying the time technicians spend searching for or documenting activities will allow them to spend more time working on aircraft.
Zymbly is built around voice activation and acts as a technician’s assistant. It sits on top of an operator’s or MRO’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and queries aircraft records, maintenance manuals, service bulletins, parts catalogues and other information and surfacing relevant information to a technician. Zymbly can walk technicians through maintenance workflows and provide copy and paste information needed to document accomplished work, but it will not completely automate documentation.
The system provides context but Robbie Bourke, Zymbly’s chief customer officer, says the partners built in “natural friction” in the process so technicians still have to own the actions throughout the maintenance process.
Zymbly says its tool can be deployed in weeks with minimal changes to operations. Customer data is encrypted, access-controlled and not used to train AI.
If technicians spend less time searching for information and documenting maintenance action, aircraft checks theoretically could become faster and technicians could have greater job satisfaction.
MRO is a “slow moving industry that under-invests in people and digitalization,” Bourke says. Technicians use ChatGPT on the shop floor so having a system designed for maintenance workflow is better, he adds.
In addition to Bourke, who led Oliver Wyman’s Cavok practice in Europe, the team includes Ben Jacob, CEO, who led AppliedAI at Multiverse, which is backed by Google, and worked at Oliver Wyman executing operational transformation in aviation; and Azmat Habibullah, CEO, who has led AI products in supply chain and Salesforce automation and was part of Oliver Wyman’s digital team.
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