Ed Bastian has a bone to pick with Silicon Valley’s marketing department.
“I think it’s a mistake to call anything artificial,” the Delta Air Lines CEO told Fortune in a wide-ranging conversation, backstage at Great Place to Work’s For All Summit in Las Vegas. “You want to scare people? Tell them that artificial intelligence is coming for you.” Bastian said he refuses to use the term inside Delta, preferring instead to call it “augmented intelligence” — a framing he argues is more honest about what the technology actually does. “I want our employees to see it as a tool to enable them to do their jobs better, not to replace them, but to enhance them.”
The distinction matters in practice, Bastian argued, saying Delta has no intention of using AI as a headcount-reduction tool. “At the end of the day, we know those job skills are going to change, as it always has. But one of the things with AI is it’s changing more rapidly than people anticipate. And you’ve got a lot of hype around it.” We need to bring the pressure down, he said.
Where automation frees up Delta workers from gate phones or reservation desks, he said, those people are getting redeployed to serve customers more directly. “To the extent there’s less need for more people at a gate or more people on a phone, we’ll redeploy those people to better serve customers even more,” he said, adding that Delta has a “higher calling” to provide the best service and the best care, and strive to do it better, even against a punishing backdrop for air travel of late.
Fuel prices loom over business
Telling Fortune and Great Place to Work CEO Michael Bush onstage that “pressure is a privilege,” Bastian noted that fuel prices can double in 30 days, as they just have. Wars can break out. Geopolitical shocks — the kind now roiling global markets, from trade disputes to regional conflicts — ripple immediately into airline demand and costs. “Just this year, look at everything that’s happened,” Bastian said. “Fuel prices spiking, wars going on, geopolitics at somewhat of a peak.” Bastian said Delta’s demand set is still “pretty strong” and “customers are still traveling,” but surging fuel prices mean pricing can’t cover the cost of carrying them, even for Delta, the most profitable airline in the business.
He reeled off the great names of air travel that have gone extinct, from Pan Am to TWA to Hughes. Speaking a day ahead of a reported $500 million rescue package for Spirit Airlines, struggling to exit bankruptcy, Bastian said he sees structural change coming for airlines over the next six to 12 months as carriers that compete purely on low price — and haven’t returned their cost of capital in years — face the consequences of the current fuel environment. “Carriers are going to have to reorganize in order to survive,” he said.
Bastian’s obsession is making sure that Delta can absorb the next shock, whatever form it takes. He recalled that he often describes the airline in two words: “differentiated and durable,” and was asked about similarities to what Jamie Dimon calls the “fortress balance sheet” in his management of JPMorgan. “I use that same language, a fortress balance sheet,” Bastian said, but he pointed out that this mentality has existed in financial institutions for quite a few years, while “airlines have not been known for them. This is, to me, is kind of the last frontier of change that Delta has to make.”
The data behind the culture
That Delta has earned a degree of credibility with its workforce that most institutions envy right now still genuinely surprises its CEO. Delta just cracked the top 10 on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, landing at No. 9 — its seventh consecutive year on the list and the only commercial airline to appear. Great Place to Work surveys found 88% of Delta employees say it’s a great place to work. Delta also ranks No. 11 on Fortune‘s World’s Most Admired Companies list for the 13th consecutive year — not just the top airline, but competing against the world’s most admired brands in every industry.
In conversation with Bush onstage at the summit, Bastian paused to stress that Delta is not just the world’s largest and most profitable airline, but also most beloved by its customers. Being on the Great Place to Work list and the Most Admired List tells Bastian, he said, “that we’re making progress on [our] mission.” At the same time, he stressed that only being number nine is below his standards. “I love it, but I’m not – I’m not happy.”
Bastian also said he’s frankly surprised that Delta continues to rank so highly, given the turbulence of the COVID and post-pandemic era. Over the last five years, he noted, Delta has brought in somewhere between 30% and 40% new employees — an enormous cultural stress test for a 100-year-old company. “I’m surprised — slash impressed — with our ability to continue moving up the levels of a great place to work, given that we’ve had such a large influx of new talent.”
The covenant that built the culture
The story of how Delta earned that loyalty begins not in a boardroom, but in a bankruptcy courthouse. Twenty years ago, as Delta’s CFO, Bastian walked into the Southern District of New York to file for Chapter 11. “I was scared,” he recalled in the conversation with Bush. “Bankruptcy is not a declaration of failure unless you use it for its purpose. It gives people a second chance.” Standing in that room surrounded by creditors and lawyers, he made a private promise: workers who had sacrificed through pay cuts, benefit losses, and layoffs would receive the first fruits of any recovery. That pledge became Delta’s profit-sharing program, which today distributes roughly 15% of the airline’s profits to frontline employees. This past Valentine’s Day, Delta paid out $1.3 billion. “We paid more profit sharing than all the other airlines put together,” he told Bush.
The more revealing test of that covenant came during COVID-19. When the pandemic wiped out the airline’s revenue virtually overnight, Bastian told his leadership team he intended to get through it without laying off a single employee. “They looked at me like I’d lost my mind,” he recalled. More than 50,000 workers ultimately volunteered to take unpaid leaves of absence for up to two years, cutting Delta’s payroll in half overnight. “They sacrificed together to get the airline not just through COVID, but through COVID even stronger,” Bastian told Fortune.
This has fed directly into the airline’s current position and Delta thriving beyond the age of “revenge travel,” which he agreed was definitely a thing. But Delta is seeing something different, he said. “It was revenge travel initially. But now it’s no longer revenge travel. Now it’s turned into more of a lifestyle decision.” Bastian said his experience shows people aren’t as interested in accumulating things as in experiences, and that this will matter in the age of AI. “We live in the experience economy.” He cited the declining birth rate as another factor here. “Part of it is the cost and everything you’ve got to do as a father of four and a grandfather of two. I understand that. But in other things, people want to invest themselves differently.”
Bastian noted that Delta has the youngest demographics in the airline industry, unusual for a premium brand, and its long-time partner American Express is growing with Gen Z and millennials, too. “Younger people want to get the Amex card … They want to get the miles. They want to dream of, how soon can I get status and how can I get into that club?” He shared that he relates to this because he still carries his first American Express card, the classic green design from more than 40 years ago, when he was working in New York City. “I still keep that green one just for old time’s sake. And that was kind of a signal that, okay, I’m a professional now.”
The soft stuff is the hard stuff
For all his talk of balance sheets and augmented intelligence, Bastian kept returning in both conversations to the same foundational point: culture is Delta’s only truly uncopiable competitive asset — and the company’s program around a $1,000 emergency savings fund is, in his telling, as much a product of the fortress mentality as any financial instrument.
The emergency savings program consists of $1,000 deposited into a personal bank account for each of Delta’s 100,000 employees, conditional on completing a financial literacy course and meeting with a financial counselor. It was born of the same logic that produced the fortress balance sheet: the idea that a financially fragile workforce cannot be durable. “If you’re paycheck to paycheck and all of a sudden you’ve got $5,000 sitting there, you feel better prepared to be your best self when you come to work,” Bastian told Fortune. More than 85% of recipients have never touched the principal, he added, and many have added to it. The math is blunt: $1,000 times 100,000 employees equals $100 million — a sum Delta committed while still clawing back from the pandemic. “[That was] at a time that we didn’t really have that kind of money because we were still recovering from COVID. But I thought it was that important.”
It’s an example of that durability mentality, which Bastian said he’s confident Delta will maintain through the age of AI. Asked whether Delta’s workers are scared of the technology, Bastian said it’s very possible. “I don’t know that they aren’t,” he said, but this is a larger issue than just one sector or one technology. “You ask people what one of the biggest challenges we have in the world today is: the lack of trust, whether it’s with the government or with AI — I mean, the trust levels are pretty low. I can’t do anything about the government, but I can help them understand what AI is and what it’s not as it relates to them.”
He added a firm line on one question AI will not answer anytime soon: “I’m never getting on an airplane without two Delta pilots on it commercially, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, even though I know the computers fly the planes in large respect today. People want to feel in control, and they want to see someone that’s in control of the experience.”
