How Qatar Airways is transforming air travel

NOW PASSENGERS CAN VIRTUALLY TOUR EVERYTHING FROM THE PREMIUM CHECK-IN AREA TO THE CABIN INTERIOR OF THEIR AIRCRAFT

Sama has a pleasant smile and a cheerful tone as she welcomes you to Hamad International Airport. She can give you an immersive walk-through of the first- or business-class check-in, help you collect your boarding pass, and even explore the Qsuite, the World’s Best Business Class. But unlike any other flying experience, here you have the luxury to “try the experience before you buy.” Qatar Airways’ latest hire is the industry’s first-ever Metahuman cabin crew. When it comes to the metaverse, there is no shortage of opinions. But look beyond the hype, and you’ll find a more nuanced use of the technology. Companies that recognize the potential of the metaverse understand that any success is contingent upon a handful of important, albeit elusive, business fundamentals—execution, market fit, usefulness, and timing. You know—like every other tech product. The airline industry has begun incorporating metaverse, bringing virtual reality (VR) to the physical airport, and allowing lounge visitors to entertain themselves with VR headsets before their flights. Some are building utility applications that align with their brand and prospective customers, taking them on a virtual journey of discovery.

SAMA AND THE QVERSE

Qatar Airways has launched Qverse—an immersive experience for visitors to the airline’s website to explore its range of products and services before they travel. Passengers can virtually navigate the premium check-in area and the premium lounges at Hamad International Airport and explore the cabin interior—economy and Qsuite seats in the airplane, with a high-fidelity 3D virtual human named Sama presenting the unique features in the cabins through a narrated script. Laying the foundations of its immersive offerings, Qatar Airways took a platformagnostic and value-driven approach, such as imbibing technology from Epic Games. The development process involved conducting photographic surveys of all areas to be transformed into 3D to ensure accuracy and a high level of fidelity. “To bring the experience to life, we employ Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, the most advanced real-time 3D creation tool available to create an immersive experience for virtual reality and optimize the environments for the web,” says Thierry Antinori, Qatar Airways chief commercial officer. Qatar Airways considers its cabin crew and the customer experience a crucial component of its success, and via Sama, it aims to showcase that. “We were inspired to create an ‘always-on’ digital version that embodies our cabin crew’s values toward our passengers,” Antinori adds. “We envision Sama to be entirely Ai-driven in the future, capable of answering queries and providing assistance.”

FUTURE OF METAVERSE IN AIRLINE TRAVEL

The diverse experience that the airline industry is venturing into through the metaverse illustrates an interest that extends beyond the technology bubble. “Virtual reality has the ability to level the playing field in the air travel industry, making it simpler for passengers to make well-informed decisions regarding their airline of choice and the quality of service they can expect both on the ground and during their journey,” says Akbar Al Baker, Qatar Airways group chief executive. And as VR hardware becomes cheaper and more capable, the range of air travel virtual experiences will only grow in the industry. Maybe soon, there will even be NFT boarding passes in the metaverse.

of what the curriculum might look like. “I already knew I had this interest and capacity for it,” he says.

In July 2022, Davis enrolled in a boot camp through Lighthouse Labs, a Canadian for-profit tech education company that offers online training in areas such as language programming, data analytics, and web development. He quit his job as an electrician and took out an $18,000 CAD loan ($13,600 USD) to cover the tuition plus living expenses. Six months later, armed with a newfound virtuosity in things like Javascript, Express, and React, he graduated.

Davis wasn’t exactly in rarefied air. Since their emergence a little over a decade ago, coding academies for aspiring programmers have become an estimated $1.3 billion industry. More than 600 programs offer courses around the globe. In North America, there are more than 100 academies offering full-time classes, either online or in person, with leading companies like Flatiron School and General Assembly charging around $15,000 on average for courses in everything from front-end web development to cybersecurity engineering. Together, these North American academies offer classes—and the promise of gaining a foothold in the tech industry—to some 25,000 people a year.

But in late May—nearly six months after graduating—davis hadn’t yet found a job. In fact, he’d landed only two interviews. “Before I took the course, a lot of the people that I spoke to said they were getting jobs before they’d even finished the course,” he says with a hint of dejection. “My experience has not been like that at all.”

The economic environment is one reason. Thanks in part to rising interest rates and fears of a looming recession, the tech sector has been shedding jobs at an alarming rate: More than 800 tech companies have undergone layoffs this year, amounting to about 208,000 job cuts, according to industry tracker Layoffs.fyi.

But arguably more concerning than even a faltering economy, both for Davis and his broader cohort of boot-camp veterans, is the rise of generative artificial intelligence, prompted by the November 2022 debut of CHATGPT. There’s still no consensus as to how exactly AI will transform the economy. Some economists worry it will widen the pool of unemployment; others foresee job losses being offset by new opportunities. One thing is clear: The tech sector will be inexorably altered.

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found in a recent study that all layoffs caused by AI in May occurred within the tech sector. And a working paper published in March by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Openai, and Openresearch determined that a sizable share of computer programmer workloads have been affected by large language models (the machine learning technology that powers generative AI).

In their current form, AI tools mostly act as assistants to help coders perform routine tasks and identify bugs. But they’re growing more sophisticated. Github, the Microsoft-owned code repository, integrated Openai’s GPT-4 model in March to bring users an AI tool capable of suggesting and helping to fix code through natural language prompts. It can even write unit tests to isolate and assess the functionality of different parts of source code. (For more on Microsoft’s AI strategy, see “The Front-runner,” page 50.) In a survey of 500 programmers released in June by Github, 92% of respondents reported using AI tools in their day-to-day work to increase productivity. But they expressed optimism that these assistants would remain just that.

It might not be long, however, before the assistant outperforms its corporeal overlord: Research published last year in the journal Science found that when the Alphabet-owned lab Deepmind pitted its Alphacode AI model in competition against human coders, Alphacode’s performance roughly corresponded to “a novice programmer with a few months to a year of training.”

The exact sort of person, in other words, who might have recently graduated from a coding boot camp.

THOUGH SOFTWARE DEVELOP

ment has long been a lucrative field, jobs were relatively scarce until the app economy emerged in the early 2010s. Suddenly, established companies and startups alike were looking for workers with coveted programming skills, and everyone from VC billionaire Marc Andreessen to President Barack Obama was espousing the virtues of coding. “Learn to code” soon became a panacea delivered to coal miners, factory workers, and anyone facing job displacement, as well as a smug directive aimed at critics of Silicon Valley’s excesses. And with this new mantra came education companies hoping to train people in—and charge them money for—those skills.

Seemingly overnight, for-profit programs began sprouting up, offering crash courses to prepare enrollees for careers in computer science. Programs varied between

“LEARN TO CODE” BECAME A PANACEA DELIVERED TO COAL MINERS, FACTORY WORKERS, AND ANYONE

FACING JOB DISPLACEMENT AS A RESULT OF AUTOMATION.