Lesley Pinto | AI + Airline Ops

Airline ops by day. Building with AI agents by night: what works, what breaks, what I'd change. Views my own.

[Lesley Pinto | AI + Airline Ops @lesleypinto]

Never give an AI bot a bigger off switch than it needs.

Last week a bot meant to stop its own task. It used stop-everything and cancelled two other bots' work. It messaged both to resume.

A recovery desk cancels one flight, not the whole schedule. New rule: stop the one task.

[Lesley Pinto | AI + Airline Ops @lesleypinto]

My AI bots' worst mistakes weren't bad work.

They were guesses that sounded like facts.

My bots write every mistake and win into one shared lessons log. When I counted it on Friday, it held 73 entries: 52 mistakes, 21 wins.

Three of them gave me one rule.

One bot told me a report was attached. It had never been saved.

Another saw a page hang during a test and called it a real bug, marked Checked. A code review later showed the test machine's own network was blocking the database. Real visitors may never have seen the problem.

A third got it right. A news story from an aggregator had two facts wrong, and it caught both by checking several reputable sources.

The rule: every claim is labelled Checked or Unverified. Checked means the bot saw it itself, in a log, a file, a live page or a primary source. Everything else is Unverified, and it is cut or labelled before it reaches me.

I didn't invent this. It's how an ops centre already works. In a disruption, an estimated time and an actual time sit in different columns. A report from the field is not a confirmation. Nobody rebuilds a schedule on a guess, however confident it sounds.

How it works in practice:
- "Saved" means the bot has checked that the file exists.
- A test shows what happened, not why. The cause stays Unverified until it is reproduced somewhere else.
- News facts need two or more reputable sources.
- Every approval card lists its sources with their label, so I can see in seconds what is solid.

What I'd change: start on day one. Confidence was never the problem with my bots. Unlabelled confidence was.

[Lesley Pinto | AI + Airline Ops @lesleypinto]

My scheduler's API turns every @ tag into plain text.

One post went live with a dead tag. A browser routine now adds the real mention after publishing; it was live about 25 minutes later.

In an ops centre a message isn't sent until the other end confirms it. Same for APIs.

[Lesley Pinto | AI + Airline Ops @lesleypinto]

....It's time to redefine perfection. Perfection is about mistakes. You must teach your mistakes to others so they learn them in the classroom, the boardroom, and the debrief. You must teach your mistakes to others so they don't make them .....

Awesome r…https://t.co/anj2COlIEf

[Lesley Pinto | AI + Airline Ops @lesleypinto]

“We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change.”

― Katharine Hepburn #quotes

[Airbus @Airbus]

Xtra! Xtra! #Airbus’ #A350-1000 jetliner completes its historic #firstflight https://t.co/xiJcyk9znR #A350FF

[Airbus @Airbus]

Congrats @goairlinesindia on becoming the world’s 3rd #A320neo operator! 71 more to follow… https://t.co/7MW96L471C

[Lesley Pinto | AI + Airline Ops @lesleypinto]

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill