LATAM Cargo bets biggest non-freighter spend on digital overhaul

LATAM Cargo is making the largest investment in its history outside freighter aircraft — a digital transformation programme spanning roughly 18 teams that has already produced 45 products, with five more due this quarter.

CEO Andrés Bianchi declined to disclose the sum, which is itself telling: airlines will tout the products but not the price tag. Speaking to The Loadstar at TIACA's Air Cargo Forum in Miami, he framed the programme as the carrier's answer to missed shipments, disrupted operations and underused capacity.

The effort sits alongside comparable moves at Atlas Air and Singapore Changi Airport, and together they mark where air cargo's technology money is actually going: into the decisions that determine whether freight moves as promised, rather than customer-facing dashboards.

How LATAM rebuilt around 18 teams

"This is the largest investment LATAM Cargo has ever made in something other than a freighter," Bianchi said. The starting point, he explained, was dismantling traditional departmental silos and identifying where performance fell short before writing any code.

"It's thinking in a different way in terms of how people work, and then asking them what they need to deliver using technology," he said.

LATAM first checks whether off-the-shelf software fits, but Bianchi estimated that 80% to 90% of what the carrier needed was worth building in-house — a striking figure for an industry long accused of renting rather than building its tools.

Customer priorities, he said, were reliability, speed and peace of mind. In practice that means attacking failures such as cargo missing a flight over a document or communication error, and rethinking tracking so shipment data reaches customers through their chosen channel instead of sitting on a website.

Better loading and planning also offers a route to releasing capacity. Bianchi cited finding an additional 5% payload as an example of the potential benefit on constrained lanes — a possibility, notably, not a measured result.

What does Atlas's millisecond decision tool change?

At Atlas Air, chief strategy and transformation officer Martin Drew described a Network Decision Support Tool built to untangle disrupted aircraft and crew schedules.

A single weather delay can strand a crew outside its permitted duty hours, triggering a chain of questions: how to position a replacement, at what cost, and whether the aircraft still reaches its maintenance base with enough time and staff. Atlas's network compounds the difficulty because it runs without a conventional hub-and-spoke pattern.

The tool produces recommendations within milliseconds, weighing the cost and operational consequences of each recovery option. "It's such a complex sort of jigsaw," Drew said, noting the exercise was previously manual and often produced less-effective decisions.

Atlas built the tool through a transformation team combining internal operational expertise with hires from consultancies and other airlines, and consolidated its data on a Databricks platform. Next in development: maintenance planning, aircraft routing and integrated aircraft-crew scheduling, plus forecasting improvements from larger data volumes. No timeline was offered.

Can Changi's slot booking cut waits further?

Changi Airport offers the story's hardest number. VP of its cargo business division Jaisey Yip said truck-dock slot booking had cut waiting times for cargo lodgement by about 25% in early results.

Launched in 2024 for cargo lodgement — submitting documentation electronically before the physical cargo arrives — and extended to collection in 2025, the system replaces uncoordinated truck arrivals with planned visits matched to shipment readiness and handlers' dock capacity. Changi runs it with SATS, dnata and technology partners. An enhanced version planned for 2027 would integrate deeper with handlers' cargo management systems and let multiple slots be consolidated into a single trip.

The airport is also trialling Aircraft 360, which uses computer vision and AI to monitor turnaround milestones and alert partners when a process falls behind, so resources can be redeployed before delays spread. Yip reported early punctuality gains but did not quantify them — a familiar gap between promise and proof.

SATS, meanwhile, is trialling autonomous vehicles to move shipments between its import terminal and forwarders' warehouses inside the free trade zone. Driverless baggage tractors already operate at Changi; extending the technology to cargo towing, Yip noted, involves further work.

For LATAM, the technology only pays off if people stay in the loop. "AI will help you make better decisions," Bianchi said. "The people at the front are going to make those decisions." How many of the 50 products deliver measurable gains — rather than the 25% Changi can already show — remains the industry's unanswered question.