Interviews - Page 3 of 15

Commercial aviation is in a strange position: demand is growing, there are not enough aircraft, yet the industry still has no truly new mass-market airliner. In 2025, global passenger traffic measured in RPK grew by 5.3%, and in February 2026 it increased by another 6.1% year-on-year. At the same time, Airbus ended 2025 with a record backlog of 8,754 commercial aircraft, and the A320 family alone has a backlog of more than 7,000 aircraft. We can see that demand for aircraft is enormous, yet the biggest segment of global aviation seems in no hurry to enter a new era.

In early March 2026, Careem ran into serious trouble. Amazon announced that its data centers in the UAE and Bahrain had been hit by drone strikes, with full recovery expected to take a long time — making it the first known case of a major American tech company’s infrastructure being knocked offline by military action. Careem’s engineers pulled off something remarkable: a cross-regional infrastructure migration, completed in a single night. By morning, the lights were back on.

GPS arrived, and at some point we stopped reading maps. There was no decision made — it just happened, almost imperceptibly, over a few months of simply not needing to. A similar shift is now underway in finance: AI is taking over tasks that until recently counted as skilled, hands-on work. According to Deloitte, 87% of CFOs say AI will be very or extremely important to the finance function in 2026. The age of paper maps, it seems, has passed here too.