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Show Notes

Ajith Balakumar is the CEO and founder of Forthcode, an aviation technology company whose origins trace back to one of India's largest coffee chains, a network of 2,500 outlets that needed an Android based point of sale system in 2015 and happened to also operate in flight retail. That accidental commission forced Forthcode to master offline first architecture years before edge computing became an industry talking point, and that same foundation now underpins the company's full suite of airline products: in flight retail, catering management, the patented loyalty concept Lounge in the Sky, and Davix, an AI roving agent built for airport ground staff. The conversation explores why connectivity in aviation is as much a geopolitical problem as a technical one. Satellite bandwidth means nothing above airspace where governments block access entirely, so every in flight system must be built to operate with zero bars. Ajith explains how Davix addresses the trust gap between frontline staff and AI by grounding every answer in cited SOP page and paragraph references rather than confident assertion alone, and describes a three stage AI maturity model moving from copilot through agent to operational intelligence. He also covers Forthcode's deliberate choice to avoid frontier LLMs and host models locally so airline data never leaves the carrier's own environment, the slow progression most airlines are making from isolated AI pilots toward genuine operational AI, and how AI assisted prototyping has compressed a founder's build cycle from days to roughly an hour.