ORLANDO, Florida—AAR Corp. launched a new subsidiary called Airvoyant on April 21 to automate aviation procurement using agentic AI.
AAR estimates the platform could reduce procurement costs by 20-30% by streamlining and quickening how procurement personnel search for, source and acquire parts.
Airlines have “invested a lot in planning for inventory, figuring out the minimum amount of inventory investment that they need to achieve the maximum amount of service level,” said John Holmes, AAR Corp’s chairman, president and CEO, “but the action of actually procuring those parts is still a very manual and inefficient task. We know that because we’re one of the largest sellers of new and used parts.”
Airvoyant uses AI agents to quickly analyze multiple supplier quotes and generate ranked recommendations based on historical procurement data. Airvoyant plans to add additional agents focused on vendor optimization and automated negotiations later this year.
Aeroxchange, the electronic supply chain transaction platform, is the first vendor to connect its pipes to Airvoyant.
The new platform also integrates with Trax, AAR’s software company that provides enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) for MRO. Because of this, “as teams are planning maintenance or responding to unscheduled events, requisitions get generated and we can immediately stream those off the system and into Airvoyant, and Airvoyant can start to apply magic,” said Jon Baker, the company’s president and general manager.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the company’s key technology partner for agentic AI. Beyond providing the technology backbone, AWS also “made an investment in helping us build this and provided really strong architectural guidance throughout,” Baker added.
Using AI to optimize inventory acquisition does not make Airvoyant unique. According to Baker, what sets it apart is the automation that can be gained from intelligent decision making: “What’s the best deal? Can I look at all of the data here? Can I look at the history of this vendor? Can I look at the logistics complexities of shipping this part from point A to B? We’re going to take into account all of these data points and let the AI agents start to make decisions.”
The new company will create a data lake where it will track transactions. If vendors are slow to respond, it will know that. Because Airvoyant will know the good and bad vendor performance, Baker said it will pay off for vendors that perform well.
Related Content
