Over the last few years, Delta Air Lines’ presence has become a staple of CES, with the airline regularly hosting splashy keynotes. This year, the company has rented out the Sphere to announce its latest slate of updates. These include (can you guess it?) an AI-powered assistant in its app, as well as an updated in-flight entertainment system with 4K HDR displays and Bluetooth connectivity. Members of Delta’s SkyMiles frequent flier program will also soon get free access to YouTube Premium and YouTube Music on board the company’s planes. Delta announced these updates at CES 2025.
The new AI assistant, which Delta calls the Delta Concierge, will roll out over the course of the year. Users will be able to interact with it using voice or text. In this age of large language models, that’s not exactly groundbreaking, of course. The idea here is to offer proactive advice and guidance for fliers, starting with notifications about upcoming passport expirations and visa requirements. Looking ahead, the service will also offer destination-specific notifications about local weather, for example.
The Concierge will also offer guidance to bag drops, Delta’s Sky Clubs, and departure gates.
This all feels useful but also a bit underwhelming, and many of these new features feel more like tablestakes than massive innovations. Indeed, I’m pretty sure no AI is needed to check whether a flier’s passport is about to expire or to tell them where their connecting gate is.
The new seatback experience, which Delta describes as “the first cloud-based in-flight entertainment system,” will begin to roll out in 2026. It promises a major upgrade to existing systems with 4K HDR QLED displays, Bluetooth connectivity, and a 96-terabyte onboard storage system to store movies, TV shows, music, and more.
Here, too, it feels a bit like Delta is playing catchup. United’s ongoing fleet refresh already offers 4K displays and Bluetooth connectivity, for example. That system may not be cloud-connected, but I’m not sure that matters to fliers, especially once the entire United fleet becomes Starlink-enabled. So far, that won’t include free YouTube Premium and Music, which Delta plans to offer.
And because a CES keynote wouldn’t be a CES keynote without announcing a few ideas that aren’t likely to ever come to market, Delta also on Tuesday announced that it plans to work with Airbus in the next flight test phase of the fello’fly project. The idea here is to have planes fly in formation — similar to flocks of geese — to save energy. This project has been ongoing for a few years now. It’s a nifty concept, but it will take so many regulatory changes to put into reality that it’s unlikely to be used anytime soon.
