As AI tools reach new levels of sophistication, our second virtual conference focused on building proficiency with the latest technologies
As AI evolves at a breakneck pace, how prepared is your business to capitalize on the latest technologies and seize an advantage against competitors? It’s a question that is undoubtedly on the minds of many business leaders, and one that compelled more than 4,200 employees within the Volaris network to participate in our second AI Summit.
Our 2025 summit was driven by our conviction that the impact of AI isn’t in a distant timeline – its impact is already here. We are seeing AI technologies reach a tipping point that is prompting our businesses to reimagine how they work. Compared to just a year ago, we are seeing AI competence within our company move beyond the early stages of experimentation. Our leaders and their teams are now reevaluating business strategies, work processes, and job descriptions due to the impact of AI.
Working with businesses across Volaris network as part of the team behind our AI Centre of Excellence, I’ve noticed the shift in conversations. Early in the year, people asked whether something was possible with AI, and now they are explaining how they are already using AI. We are seeing positive surprises from Volaris businesses as they experiment and lean in.
-Robert Kirby, AI Architect Lead, Business Transformation Team, Volaris Group and a presenter at the 2025 Volaris AI Summit
2025 AI Summit: Another step to advancing AI fluency
To navigate the advantages and vulnerabilities brought by this disruptive technology, our organization is harnessing the power of our knowledge-sharing community. Volaris has built a learning-centered organization that has not only survived, but thrived through 30 years of technological change. Furthermore, AI complements our existing culture of leveraging insights from data to guide strategic decisions, and staying at the forefront of AI is a company-wide effort that our C-suite actively champions.
To help our businesses remain resilient and adaptable during this wave of AI growth, we are continuing to invest by committing resources to enable our businesses to use AI and accelerate their learning and development. We laid the groundwork by introducing an experimentation framework within Volaris in 2022.
Ramping up our investment, we held our first AI summit in early 2024, followed by an AI Innovation Challenge at Quadrants in fall 2024 – all while supporting our leaders with ongoing AI education through peer-to-peer learning sessions and internal resources. In late 2024, we established an AI Center of Excellence at Volaris Group. Comprised of a team of AI champions, the Center of Excellence offers a dependable source of guidance to our businesses that are exploring use cases for AI.
A colleague of mine likes to reminisce about the days when he used to send out marketing materials via fax machine. I think in several years, we’ll be looking back and reminiscing about how we used to work before AI.
-Lauren Galietti, Vice President of Marketing, Centurisk and a presenter at the 2025 Volaris AI Summit
Mastering new skills and mindsets for an AI workplace
A major theme of the event? In the age of AI, leaders and their teams can succeed by embracing new mindsets about work, as well as the skills and processes to work with new tools.
“AI is about helping create a business transformation, and it’s about building new processes with AI at the center of them,” said Volaris COO and CFO Brian Beattie during the event’s closing remarks. “It’s a fundamental shift that’s happening.”
Topics related to this theme:
- Overcoming old habits, leadership assumptions, and structural blockers to AI adoption
- Understanding the strengths and limitations of different AI tools and how to integrate them into existing workflows
- Rethinking organizational structures and workflows when adopting an AI-first strategy
- Prompt engineering: Crafting clear, specific prompts and building repeatable, scalable prompt systems
- Using AI responsibly, as guided by organizational governance, regulations, and policies
- Learning about future AI developments expected in 2026
- Measuring ROI and productivity gains from AI adoption
Change at pace is hard for many people, particularly when it’s not clear where we’re going. As a leader, you need to spend lots of time with your people as they navigate these changes.
Our team is watching YouTube videos, following Reddit forums, and consuming all they can to stay aware, because learning about AI is continual. Meanwhile, leadership needs to set the vision, strategy, facilitate the tools, and provide plans for learning.-David Wilkes, CEO, Celcat/Aion and a presenter at the 2025 Volaris AI Summit
Use cases: How Volaris businesses are using AI
Several sessions presented case studies about how businesses are applying AI strategically in various business functions. These use cases showed the potential for small teams to find efficiencies and gain outsized advantages against competitors through AI implementation.
A sampling of areas where Volaris businesses have seen benefits from AI:
- R&D and product: Accelerating product innovation, rethinking R&D workflows, enabling cost-efficient UX/UI updates, and extracting knowledge from code
- Customer care: Solving customer issues using chatbots and call center agents
- Legal: Efficiently reviewing large volumes of documents
- Sales and marketing: Supporting content development, lead qualification, and considering search engine AI optimization alongside SEO
- Professional services: Cutting costs and improving delivery time for billable projects
- Market research and strategy development: Faster decision-making enabled by AI-powered data analysis
As we move forward with AI, we need to keep our feet on the ground while our heads explore above the clouds and beyond. It’s always tempting to chase trends, but the real value lies in context: What problem are we solving, for whom, and how will we measure success? A touch of structure massively increases the chances of success, and structure isn’t a buzzkill; it’s the scaffolding for sustainable experimentation.
-Akshay Kalle, Head of AI, Modaxo and a presenter at the 2025 Volaris AI Summit
Key takeaways from the 2025 AI Summit
While each participant will take their own lessons from the event, Volaris CEO Mike Dufton and COO and CFO Brian Beattie shared some of their reflections at the closing session:
- Users of AI tools are more likely to have success when they plan and have a clear objective when engaging with AI tools. Understanding how to harness the strengths of a particular AI tool while mitigating its weaknesses can help employees focus their capabilities on more valuable tasks that require human judgment.
- AI can be useful at teaching users how to engage with its capabilities, as long as they have a point of view and a direction they want to go in. Users can calibrate the speed of the tool by asking it to slow down or explain how it came to a specific conclusion.
- Enthusiasm and excitement can be infectious within the Volaris learning community, and it can go a long way when climbing the learning curve. We encourage our people to look to the AI champions within the Volaris network and learn from them.
- As an organization, we want AI to help us remain true to our value of serving customers. This can mean seeing our businesses operating with more agility and responsiveness to customer needs, such as by bringing products to market faster and scaling rapidly at lower cost.
Although the 2025 AI Summit has concluded, the learning certainly isn’t over. Volaris looks forward to bringing more skill development opportunities to our business community in the upcoming months and years.
