Stop Renting Your Software. Build It With AI. (The CBAA 2026 Talk)

We took the Innovation Stage at CBAA 2026 in Calgary on June 11 with a talk called "Stop Renting Your Software. Build It with AI." Shaan Bhanji from FlyFast Air moderated, and we kept time for questions. Here is the whole argument, for the people who were in the room and the ones who were not.

Count your software. The number is bigger than you think.

Start with the software your operation runs on. Scheduling. Quoting. Maintenance tracking. CRM. The document portal. Duty-time. Expenses. That is seven before anyone breaks a sweat.

Now add the shadow IT, the part nobody puts on the list. The spreadsheets. The side tools. The one critical workbook that lives on a dispatcher's desktop and would take the operation down if the laptop died. That is software too.

That whole pile is your application portfolio. Most operators have never actually counted it. And every line on it is a bill, every month, forever. You are not buying these tools. You are renting them, and the rent never stops.

For thirty years, renting was the only sane answer

Every app on that list was once a decision: build it, or rent it. For thirty years in this industry the answer was always rent. That was not a failure of nerve. The math was genuinely against building.

Business aviation is a small market, a few thousand operators worldwide. Vendors build for the size of the market, so you got something generic, built once, priced at a premium to make it pencil out. Then it got worse three ways. Per-seat pricing scales against you, so the better your year, the more you pay for the same software. Your data lives in their database, so you rent access to your own flight history and customer list. And every tool is an island, so you pay a second tax in human hours retyping data between systems that were never going to integrate.

People call this underspending on technology, like it was timidity. It was not. Renting generic, per-seat tools genuinely paid badly, and you had no other option. You were right to be skeptical. The math just changed.

What "build it with AI" actually means

No magic in it. You describe the tool you need in plain language, the way you would explain it to a sharp new hire. The AI writes the working code. A technical person steers it and checks it, the way an editor checks a fast writer. That is the whole thing.

It is not autonomous. There is no robot running your company. A human is accountable for every line that ships. What changed is cost and speed. The part that used to take a team of developers months now takes one steerer and a domain expert a few weeks. Call it a 10 to 100 times collapse in the time and cost of building software.

Here is the part that surprises people. The scarce ingredient in good aviation software was never the code. It was the domain knowledge, how dispatch actually thinks, what your quoting logic really is, the exception that breaks every off-the-shelf scheduler. You already have that. What you were missing was a cheap way to turn it into software. That is the part that got cheap.

So re-run the decision on every app

Here is what you do Monday. Go back to that portfolio, the whole list, and re-run the decision on every single line with the new map.

Build when the tool touches what makes you different: your quoting logic, your dispatch workflow, the data you want to hold yourself. That is exactly where a generic product forces you to compromise and where owning it pays off.

Buy when it is genuine commodity that already works fine: email, accounting, the boring solved stuff. Do not go build a worse version of something that costs $40 a month. That is not ownership, that is a hobby.

And retire, the one operators forget, the shelfware you are renting and barely using, and the spreadsheets papering over the gaps between systems. Half the portfolio is dead weight nobody has audited.

Here is the honest caveat, so nobody leaves thinking this is free. You still need one technical person who can steer the build and own it. AI lowered the cost of building dramatically. It did not remove the need for judgment. The operators who win put one capable person next to the AI and point them at the right problem.

The proof, running in operations today

This is not theory. A few real ones.

The headline first. We produced a Minimum Equipment List, primarily AI-written, that Transport Canada approved after two rounds of review. A MEL governs whether an aircraft is legal to dispatch, about as safety-critical as paperwork gets. A regulator looked at primarily-AI-written work in the most safety-critical corner of this industry and signed off. The question is no longer whether AI can be trusted with serious aviation work. That answer came from Transport Canada, not from us.

Then we authored a MEL for a hydrogen-powered aircraft, a brand-new airframe with no precedent and nothing to copy from. Exactly the situation where you would assume you need a big team and a long timeline.

On the everyday end: a conversational quoting tool that builds and revises charter quotes through plain back-and-forth, replacing the manual, ad-hoc quoting an operator was doing by hand. And a crew-compliance rebuild we stood up in about 90 days that, in the process, surfaced 21 records the old process had silently been getting wrong, people whose status did not match reality. That is the difference between thinking you are compliant and being compliant, and we found it because we built the thing to check.

We have done the same on cost. We replaced a customer-service stack, a chat tool plus a scheduling tool, that ran about $300 a month, with one we built and own that runs on single-digit dollars a month. Websites that a traditional agency quotes in months, we ship in 3 to 4 weeks. None of it required being a software company. It required knowing what we wanted and having one person steer the build.

Stop renting by default

For thirty years you rented by default, because building software was a rich company's game and aviation was too small a market to build for. Both of those things were true. Neither is true anymore.

And here is the part we find genuinely worth sitting with. The industry that supposedly underspends on technology is the one positioned to leapfrog, precisely because it did not sink a fortune into the expensive era. You skipped it. You get to start clean in the cheap era: build what makes you different, buy the commodity, retire the rest, own your data, and pay for what you use instead of paying rent forever on something that was never built for you.

You have been renting by default. Stop. Run the portfolio. Build what is yours.

If you run an aviation operation and you want to walk that portfolio with someone who has done it, that is the conversation we like having. If you are looking for a vendor to sell you one more per-seat subscription, we are not your people.