Business aviation's biggest data provider is letting customers ask questions in plain language, inside the chat tools they already use.

At NBAA-BACE in Las Vegas, JetNet Group's chief data scientist, Christoph Kohler, said roughly 20 percent of JetNet customers now query the company's aircraft, transaction and flight-activity data through AI assistants. Kohler also manages WingX, the group's flight-tracking arm.

What the connectors do

JetNet made what it calls AI connectors available to enterprise subscribers in May. They link the JetNet and WingX databases to a customer's AI assistant and to workplace apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp. Instead of building a report or filtering a dashboard, a user can type a question in everyday language and get an answer drawn from JetNet's data. AIN's headline says the data now flows into ChatGPT and Claude.

This fits what WingX showed on the convention floor. As we covered earlier, its new agents work from more than 15 years of proprietary history and stay inside that data, rather than searching the open web. Kohler described the shift as moving from the dashboard era to the agent era.

Why it matters

For years, aircraft and flight data lived in specialist tools that required training to use well. Putting that data behind a chat interface changes who can use it. A broker could check activity patterns before pitching an operator. A sales team could look up an aircraft's history without waiting for an analyst. A flight department could ask a quick question from Slack or Teams in the middle of a busy day.

It also shows how AI adoption in this industry is spreading: not through one flashy consumer app, but through the data companies that professionals already trust, connecting to the assistants those professionals already use.

Cautions

  • The answer is only as good as the data and the question. A plain-language query can hide assumptions about which records were searched and how they were filtered. Users should still be able to see the underlying data.
  • Access and confidentiality. Connecting a commercial database to a messaging tool raises obvious questions about who can see what. JetNet has limited the connectors to enterprise subscribers, and companies will want clear internal rules.
  • Details are limited. The full AIN report is behind a membership wall, so we can't say more about pricing, safeguards or how the 20 percent figure was measured.

What to watch

  • Whether other aviation data providers follow with their own connectors.
  • Whether charter brokers start using market data in chat to qualify leads and price trips.
  • How providers handle accuracy when an assistant paraphrases proprietary records.

Bottom line: The first AI tool many aviation professionals adopt may not be a new product at all. It may be an old data source with a new front door.

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