Inside the Impact
— Andrés Bucchi Chief Data and Engineering Officer, LATAM AirlinesHaving Delphina in our tool belt — we can now think of every single data point we generate as having applicable value.
About LATAM Airlines
LATAM Airlines Group is the largest airline group in Latin America, connecting passengers and cargo across the Americas, Europe, Oceania, and Africa. Headquartered in Santiago, Chile, LATAM is investing in becoming an AI-native operator — what CDO Andrés Bucchi describes as "a tech company that flies planes."
- 250,000+ passengers flown every single day
- 160 destinations across 27 countries — the largest route network in the region
- 41,000+ team members operating a 371-aircraft fleet (plus 20 dedicated freighters)
- US$14.5B in 2025 revenue — LATAM's strongest financial year on record
In Andrés' words
Before Delphina, I think I was doubtful about automated research ever happening.
I'm Andrés Bucchi, Chief Data and Engineering Officer at LATAM Airlines. We are the largest carrier in the region. We fly 250,000 people every single day. And we are an airline on our way to becoming a tech company that flies planes, and I'm very excited about it. What I yearn for is making sure that every single data point we generate has the leverage to impact our value.
Airlines are huge. I used to work in tech, and tech is huge, but airlines are like a little country. So the problems we have span from marketing, finance, all the way to material science.
If you have a 1% impact in some place, you are talking about tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. So that's what we are aspiring for, a sustained impact of 1%, the next 1%, the next 1%. We are betting for the sustained impact over time, and that requires a change in your mindset and new technologies.
I want us to become the best airline in the world, but when you have that, you still have to generate the insights. You still have to generate the pre-research and the hypothesis. And that's not easy to scale.
And what we see in Delphina is, of course, you have kind of the whole stretch from bread and butter analytics, but it also opens the door to these really advanced research capabilities that can be automated and hyperscaled. This is one of the spaces we want to double down because we have already seen Delphina bring forward some quite interesting insights. At some point, we had to ask people to kind of take it easy. So the quality of the tool is, I think, is super clear.
Again, I think that the companies that position themselves at the edge of technology at some point have to reach that edge. And the questions you start having are incrementally more and more difficult, but they have huge returns on investment if you tackle them correctly. But again, that's the space you want to be in if you are thinking about being digital and state of the art.
So you first want to look at big volumes of data and get some hypotheses. Then you want to introduce potential spaces that you want to explore. Then you want to experiment. Then you want to feed that back in. Five years ago, that's 5 PhDs, 10 data scientists, a bunch of data engineers, machine learning engineers. So it sets you back quite a lot, and it takes time.
And then you also have business, like the business IQ is incredibly important in this aspect. And you're not always as lucky as finding a really seasoned PhD that has 5 years working on the same problem, and at the same time, them being really knowledgeable at that specific level in that specific domain in an airline.
The good thing about AI is that if you use it correctly, if you prompt it correctly, if you provide the correct resources and embed that in a specific process in the correct way, you can have that times a thousand and for pennies on the dollar.
My team is happier. They're having fun. Delphina has enabled a new courtyard for them. They're playing with ideas and they are generating high-quality hypotheses quickly. How their role has changed, I think that they see themselves as value generators. It's easier to connect the groundwork, the elbow grease, with potential impact. And that's a great motivator. You also see how people specialize in problems and start being in that special place where everybody's happy, where you have highly technical people thinking in business and developing their business IQ, and having more engaged conversations with senior leadership that understand the business problems. Again, you provide this kind of tooling to your workforce and they just transform.
Having Delphina in our tool belt — I think that we can now think of every single data point we generate as having applicable value. And we have partnered with Delphina to achieve that because it's a very difficult thing to achieve.
See what Delphina can do for your team
LATAM's adoption of Delphina shows what is possible when a 41,000-person airline pairs deep operational data with an AI layer that runs the full research loop — executives and analysts asking sharper questions of the business, several hundred users finding leverage in every data point they generate, and a data team that has shifted from elbow-grease execution to high-impact value generation.
Ready to see how Delphina works for your team? Schedule a demo.