Core Modernization and AI Substrate Across a Transformation Portfolio

A major US airline engaged Taller through a staffing partner in March 2023, with work spanning applied AI and core modernization. Taller ran six pods across AI/data and .NET/Angular rebuilds, with multi-year extensions confirmed.

The airline’s future commercial flexibility depended on a portfolio of modernization investments that had to work as one foundation. Legacy systems (the passenger service system, or PSS, the core reservations-and-ticketing platform with its flat files, text-based "green screen" terminals, and more than thirty separate seat-assignment applications) needed disciplined modernization onto modern cloud architecture. Cryptic operational records, like the passenger-name-record and seat-history codes that took agents months of training to read, needed an AI translation layer to cut that overhead. And the broader commercial-AI ambition (the advertising platform, loyalty personalization, and connection-optimization decisions) needed a shared framework that turned isolated pilots into firm-wide capability. Each investment mattered on its own; together they formed the foundation the airline’s next decade of options rested on.

Taller’s contribution spanned both the AI and the modernization sides of this portfolio. On the AI side, Taller operated four pods: employee-productivity AI (large language models plus retrieval-augmented generation, for content generation and intelligent search at the point of work); aircraft-manual comparison (a retrieval system with full traceability of version changes across hundreds of PDF and XML manuals, for compliance); customer-care analytics for the loyalty program (centralized self-service insight built on Tibco Spotfire); and an enterprise generative-AI framework (reusable agent development, multi-agent workflow orchestration, and graph-based retrieval). On the modernization side, Taller ran the crew-scheduling rebuild (a .NET Core, Angular, and Cordova rebuild following a prior operational incident) and the customer-care business-rules-engine rewrite (a .NET Core rebuild anchored on IBM’s decision-management engine). Taller did not operate the PSS and seating modernization itself, nor several third-party platforms (an operational-intelligence platform, a telematics stack, and the data-collaboration "clean rooms" behind the advertising platform) that sat within other vendor partnerships. Taller operated the engineering pods the broader transformation depended on for execution capacity.