Artificial inteligence is enabling FlyExclusive to bring better service experience to customers faster while improving business processes.
For FlyExclusive’s Chairman Jim Segrave (pictured), artificial intelligence is not just a way to answer questions faster.
It is a chance to make the entire private-aviation journey feel more like flying on your own airplane—with less friction, less wasted time, and potentially lower operating costs.
“The ideas have always been there,” Segrave said.
He adds, “Now you can actually deliver on this.”
The difference is saving millions in development costs and months, or even years, in time and delays.
In Segrave’s view, AI makes it possible to turn long-standing ideas about better service into practical tools, built and refined in weeks rather than the months or years they might once have required.
Segrave has already experimented on his own.
The boss described building a personal app for himself in about four hours.
It brought together his own flight activity, calendar information and other connected services.
Segrave’s app tracks his trips, his passengers, and fuel use, among other details.
It even includes his online shopping and other personal activities, giving him a one-stop place to manage everything going on around him.
The experience has changed the way he thinks about development: once the systems are connected, he said, people can describe what they want in everyday language and use AI to help build it.
That hands-on experimentation is informing FlyExclusive’s work.
One of the company’s emerging applications is an AI-powered quoting experience for wholesale customers.
A charter broker can text a request with details such as the route, departure time, and aircraft type.
The system checks the company’s schedule and returns an option; the broker can then request a preliminary trip sheet and continue through a digital quote-and-contract process.
Segrave says the aim is not simply to move a phone conversation onto a screen.
The system can also consider alternatives that may better fit the schedule—for example, a different departure time that could improve aircraft utilization or reduce trip cost.
Those reduced costs can be passed along as an incentive for the customer.
Segrave emphasized that the customer’s request still matters: the technology should offer useful options, not make the experience feel like an obstacle course.
That distinction is central to how he describes service.
Private flyers value time, but they can still face delays while waiting for information about a trip, a tail number, or an aircraft’s position.
An AI assistant connected to company systems could provide answers at any hour and automate routine updates.
“A customer emails us with a question at 10 p.m.; they get an answer in minutes instead of the next morning. This thing never sleeps,” Segrave said, contrasting automation with the risk of a busy team member overlooking a message or notification.
The larger goal is an “owner experience”: making customers feel that the aircraft and the service are organized around them.
Segrave described a possible journey in which a customer’s arrival time helps coordinate the pilot, aircraft, and ground team.
With a customer’s permission to share location, the system could estimate travel time to the airport and provide directions or transportation options.
Segrave also sees opportunities to reduce unnecessary waiting on the aircraft.
If a customer is not yet close to the airport, better timing could help avoid starting an aircraft’s auxiliary power unit too early.
Across a fleet and many daily trips, he said, those minutes and fuel costs can add up.
The company is also considering a broader role for AI: acting as a travel assistant beyond the flight itself.
Speaking alongside Segrave at the NBAA convention this week in Las Vegas, newly minted Chief Commercial Officer Brian Reid said future AI applications range from helping customers arrange ground transportation to making restaurant reservations, rather than requiring them to switch between separate services.
“They trust us with flying them,” he says.
Segrave said the vision is a more continuous experience, from planning through arrival.
The work has an operational case.
Segrave cited roughly 14,000 monthly emails involving member services and membership customers and another 28,000 with wholesale customers.
AI would not just reduce messages, but also handle recurring requests—such as finding trip information or answering questions about baggage capacity—quickly and consistently.
If the system can retrieve reliable information from the relevant company data, it can reduce the back-and-forth that consumes both customer and employee time.
AI is also changing who builds these tools.
Segrave pointed to employees outside the traditional technology team who are using AI to create applications for their work within the company’s secure systems.
Now people who understand a business process can implement AI solutions around it.
That shift raises questions about jobs. Segrave acknowledged that some positions will disappear, even as new roles emerge, and said the company is encouraging employees to adapt.
Since its launch a decade ago, FlyExclusive has become the nation’s fifth-largest private jet operator measured by fractional and charter hours.
Segrave says that thanks to AI, the company will provide faster answers, fewer manual handoffs, better coordination, and less waste.
“The measure of success will be whether AI makes private flying feel simpler and more attentive—not merely more automated,” Segrave says.
FlyExclusive was recently tabbed by World Travel Awards as top charter operator in North America.
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