JetNet Opens Its Aviation Data to AI Assistants

About 20% of JetNet customers now query the company’s aircraft, transaction, and flight-activity data through artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, JetNet Group chief data scientist Christoph Kohler said on Monday at NBAA-BACE.

Kohler—who also manages WingX, JetNet Group’s flight-tracking arm—said JetNet made its “AI connectors” available to customers with enterprise subscriptions in May. The connectors link JetNet and WingX databases to customers’ AI assistants and workplace apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp, so users can ask questions in plain language and get answers drawn from that data. 

Most early users are aircraft brokers, market analysts, airports, and supply-chain companies, Kohler said. “I’m expecting to see more and more verticals, especially, I would say, after the fuel and FBOs, the OEMs are going to work on this more intensively because there’s more cooperative legacy to kind of work through. It’s important to realize that this is not an AI solution on its own.”

JetNet supplies the data, and customers choose their own AI tools. A “semantic layer” built on aviation knowledge steers those tools to the right information. Researchers at the company’s headquarters in Utica, New York, check the data for accuracy, and engineers ensure every answer can be traced back to its source.

During live demonstrations, Kohler pulled up every business jet parked at Las Vegas-area airports and profiled traffic around last year’s Formula One race there, which he said roughly doubled or tripled business jet activity at local airports during race week. Because WingX data dates to 2006, customers can compare such events against years of baseline traffic and forecast demand, he said.

JetNet’s aircraft data and WingX’s flight-tracking data also power Ramp Monitor, a JetNet application that tracks aircraft movements on service ramps to estimate each supplier’s share of handling, parking, fuel, and maintenance business, with history dating to January 2025. Some of those figures are estimates, according to JetNet.

Ramp Monitor calculates fuel sales from the length of the flights aircraft make after leaving a ramp, and it infers likely maintenance work from how long aircraft sit at known maintenance facilities.

In another demonstration, Kohler showed how an AI agent can sift through aircraft positions on the ground to gauge FBO’s share of traffic, an analysis he said covers about 100 airports, mostly in the U.S. and some in Europe.

Looking Beyond the Flight Data

Tracking data shows where business aircraft go but not why—a gap that a separate JetNet partnership aims to close. JIQ, JetNet’s market intelligence platform, and Seefeld Group, a Montreal-based marketing research and behavioral economics consultancy, launched the UtilizationEx survey this week at NBAA-BACE. 

The survey asks operators about mission requirements, aircraft availability, maintenance, training, operating costs, fleet composition, and owner priorities. JIQ will pair their answers with WingX flight-activity data to explain aircraft utilization trends and forecast demand.

“Flight activity data does a tremendous job of telling us what operators were able to fly. But it does not tell us what they were thinking or what influenced their behavior,” said Seefeld Group president Charles Porteous.

Seefeld will lead the research and analysis, working with marketing research firm Ad Hoc Research on survey design and execution. Seefeld plans to collect data in the first quarter of 2027 and deliver results to subscribers in the second quarter, segmented by aircraft category, region, manufacturer, and fleet size and reported only in aggregate.

Through September, global business jet activity was running about 3% ahead of last year’s pace, according to JIQ data.