OAG | Our Experience

OAG, a leading provider of aviation intelligence, relies on fast, reliable data to successfully track over 9 billion passengers on daily flights. It wanted to move faster, build smarter and put AI at the heart of how it delivers, but legacy technology was holding its flagship product back.

Together, we rebuilt the product, supported the shift to product-led value streams, and established an AI SDLC workflow built with Claude Code and Claude Projects: AI agents supporting delivery end to end, and a Claude-powered knowledge base helping teams turn customer and product data into decisions faster. The result is 50% faster time to value, and AI-generated tickets that need four times less remediation than human-written ones.

Overview

OAG's data provides critical insights for major global airlines, powering many of the biggest names in travel, from American Airlines to Emirates. To keep its competitive lead, OAG needed to rebuild its flagship product, OAG Analyser, so it could scale with customer demand and get new features to customers faster, while also modernising its real-time data platform, Flightview, and migrating to the cloud.

Working alongside OAG's engineers, our clear joint goal was to leverage their technical strength and redirect it toward what mattered most: the customer experience. AI, and Claude in particular, became central to how that work was delivered.

"CreateFuture's technical expertise and collaborative spirit were instrumental in modernising our aviation analytics platform, Analyser. Their team seamlessly integrated with ours, delivering cutting-edge solutions that not only solved our immediate challenges but also positioned us for future growth and innovation. We've seen a tangible impact on our business, and we're confident in our ability to meet the evolving needs of our customers."

James Cameron-Williams
Chief Product & Technology Officer OAG Aviation

Opportunity

OAG possessed a strong engineering culture, but the opportunity was to evolve it into a product-led, customer-focused model. It would mean aligning teams around measurable business outcomes, rather than just technical outputs. This required a shift in mindset, emphasising customer value and continuous improvement, alongside technology change.

Alongside this cultural shift, OAG saw the opportunity to build a more resilient and agile technology foundation. It meant modernising its complex portfolio of over 150 legacy applications to simplify systems and improve security. Specific product goals included delivering a faster, more responsive experience for OAG Analyser's global users and creating a scalable, secure foundation for Flightview to accelerate new feature development.

OAG's ambition went further than a rebuild. It wanted AI at the heart of how it delivers, as part of how work actually moved from idea to production rather than a set of tools used in isolation. Ticket writing, pull request review and security review all leaned on the time of a limited number of senior people, and insight from customer interviews and user tracking sat in separate places, so turning that evidence into product decisions was slower than it needed to be.

Solution

Our strategy took a unified approach, combining technological change with a critical shift in team mindset regarding value delivery. We began with a data-driven review of the entire 150-application estate using the 5Rs of Rationalisation. For the high-value OAG Analyser, we chose to replace the legacy system, rebuilding it as a cloud-native product with its data moved onto Snowflake to drastically reduce latency. OAG Flightview was refactored to rebuild the back end, strengthening security and reducing overheads. Given the scale and complexity of the rebuild, we brought an AI-native engineering approach to the work, using Claude Code for agentic code generation to keep pace with the ambition of the programme.

We guided the transition from a siloed structure to multi-functional, product-led value streams, starting with the Analytics Value Stream as a working blueprint. Workshops with the executive team aligned the organisation on a new, customer-centric vision, made tangible through defined OKRs and KPIs.

As those teams formed, we established an AI SDLC workflow with AI agents supporting delivery end to end. Using Claude Code, we built a library of skills, agents and commands that let agents create and pick up tickets, open and review pull requests, and deploy, with OAG's people approving each key step. A delegated engineering agent now handles pull request reviews, ticket pickups and security reviews, so senior engineers can focus their time on the changes that need their judgement.

On the product side, we used Claude Projects to build a knowledge base from OAG's customer interviews and user tracking data. Product teams can ask questions of their research and usage evidence in one place, which helps them turn customer and product data into decisions faster.

Beyond the core Analyser platform, we built and shipped "Ask Analyser", a natural language interface that lets OAG's users query and explore their flight data by simply asking a question, rather than manually building reports through Analyser's parameters and filters. Built on assistant-ui and calling Azure AI Foundry via a Next.js server, it moved from an initial prototype to a live production release for OAG's users, giving teams a faster, more intuitive route to the insights buried in Analyser's data without first needing to master its filter configuration.

Outcome

Our partnership delivered lasting results, reshaping OAG's ability to innovate. OAG now gets to value 50% faster, with a $12M flagship product rebuilt for scale and a product-led operating model that has broken down silos and shortened the time it takes to bring new ideas to market. The systematic rationalisation of its 150-application estate and migration to the cloud established a coherent, secure, and efficient composable architecture, positioning the company for future growth.

The AI SDLC workflow has lifted quality as well as pace. AI-generated tickets require 4x less remediation than human-generated tickets, and agentic PR review is delivering hundreds of actionable comments across pull requests, raising the baseline quality of code before a human reviewer sees it. The Claude-powered knowledge base gives product teams a quicker route from customer evidence to decisions.

OAG now has an AI-driven delivery model that's its own to build on. Together with the new platform and the establishment of an AI Centre of Excellence, it gives OAG an innovation engine that lets it keep creating new value and maintain its competitive advantage.