AAR Corp. (NYSE: AIR) launched Airvoyant on April 21 as a wholly owned subsidiary, deploying AI agents to automate aircraft parts procurement for airlines and maintenance organizations. The platform connects to over 5,000 suppliers through the Aeroxchange ecosystem and is built natively on Amazon Web Services, according to the company’s announcement.
Six airlines signed on as launch partners and advisors: Air Europa, Allegiant, Atlas Air, JetBlue, Thai Airways, and Virgin Atlantic. Delta Air Lines and Air Canada are collaborating as subject matter experts to shape the platform’s development.
The Procurement Problem
Most aircraft parts procurement still runs on fragmented systems, email-driven requests for quotes (RFQs), and manual quote comparison. AAR CEO John Holmes framed the opportunity in comments reported by Aviation Week: airlines have invested heavily in inventory planning, “but the action of actually procuring those parts is still a very manual and inefficient task. We know that because we’re one of the largest sellers of new and used parts.”
AAR estimates Airvoyant could reduce procurement costs by 20-30%, according to Aviation Week.
How the Agents Work
Airvoyant’s AI agents analyze inbound supplier quotes and generate ranked purchase recommendations based on historical procurement data: prior transactions, pricing patterns, and supplier performance, per the press release. The platform integrates directly with Trax, AAR’s enterprise resource planning software for MRO, so maintenance requisitions flow automatically into the procurement pipeline.
“As teams are planning maintenance or responding to unscheduled events, requisitions get generated and we can immediately stream those off the system and into Airvoyant,” Jon Baker, the subsidiary’s president and general manager, told Aviation Week.
The platform will also track vendor performance in a data lake, rewarding responsive suppliers with higher rankings and flagging slow ones, Baker said. Additional agents focused on demand consolidation, vendor optimization, and automated negotiation are planned for later in 2026.
AAR’s Software Play
Airvoyant is the third company in AAR’s aviation software portfolio, joining Trax (MRO ERP) and Aerostrat. For AAR, a $4.9 billion market cap company that reported $845 million in Q3 FY2026 sales, this is a strategic bet that software and agent-driven automation can become a significant revenue line alongside its traditional parts supply and repair services.
AWS served as both the technology backbone and architectural advisor. “AWS also made an investment in helping us build this and provided really strong architectural guidance throughout,” Baker told Aviation Week.
The B2B Procurement Shift
Aviation is one of the last major industries where procurement remains stubbornly manual. Parts sourcing involves thousands of unique components, variable lead times, airworthiness certifications, and urgent unscheduled demand from aircraft-on-ground events. The complexity made it resistant to simple automation.
Agent-based procurement changes the equation because agents can weigh multiple variables simultaneously: price, vendor reliability history, logistics complexity, lead time, and certification status. The jump from “search a catalog” to “recommend the optimal purchase decision across all available data” is where the value concentrates. With negotiation agents arriving later this year, AAR is building toward a system where procurement professionals supervise agent recommendations rather than manually running every RFQ themselves.