For nearly a century, United Airlines has connected people, businesses, and cultures across the globe. With more than 5,000 daily flights serving 360 destinations and 100,000+ employees serving 175 million customers a year, United's scale and complexity make it one of the largest and most technologically sophisticated enterprises in the world. 

Behind the scenes, its systems process billions of transactions each day, handling everything from reservations and aircraft maintenance to loyalty programs and flight operations. At that scale, every millisecond counts.

So how does a company of this size modernize its infrastructure, standardize APIs across thousands of applications, and still move fast enough to embrace artificial intelligence safely and responsibly?

At API Summit 2025, Ninos Gabriel, Director of Enterprise Architecture, DevOps, Cloud, Contact Center Services, and GenAI at United Airlines, shared how the company is transforming its technology ecosystem with Kong — enabling consistent standards, developer efficiency, and enterprise-grade readiness for AI.

If your organization is working to balance governance with innovation, United’s experience can help you understand how structure can actually be a springboard for speed.

As the world's largest airline measured by available seat miles and traffic, United Airlines runs a vast network of systems that must operate in perfect sync 24 hours a day, across time zones and regulatory environments.

“We’re a heterogeneous environment. We’re a hybrid organization. We have workloads in AWS, we’re serverless in some areas, and we still have mainframes on the backend," Gabriel said. "It’s complex, and that’s what makes it fun.” 

That complexity shows in over 2,200 applications, more than 5,000 APIs, and roughly 1.4 billion daily API transactions across mission-critical workloads

When Gabriel joined United, he found an environment that encouraged innovation but lacked common standards. Different teams built and deployed APIs independently, resulting in fragmentation and duplicated effort.

“It was a very decentralized organization,” Gabriel said. “That helped us innovate quickly, but it also meant every team was solving the same problems in slightly different ways.”

The decentralized model accelerated progress but created challenges for governance, performance, and security, especially when the airline expanded its use of AI.

United had begun adopting predictive, generative, and agentic AI to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency. From personalized travel updates to intelligent routing and scheduling, AI was reshaping the business. But without a standardized API layer, scaling those innovations consistently and responsibly was next to impossible.

“Security and safety are number one for us,” Gabriel said. “We won’t compromise on that, even as we innovate. We needed a way to move fast while staying compliant and secure.”

United’s engineering leadership realized that achieving both speed and safety required a new approach — one that provided shared standards without slowing down creative teams.

United selected Kong for its enterprise-wide API and AI platform, citing Kong’s innovation velocity, compatibility with United’s operating model, and alignment with its modernization goals. This strategic decision was aimed at unifying governance, performance, and visibility across its technology landscape.

“One of the big reasons why we selected Kong as our solution across the enterprise is we saw the revolution and the evolution that Kong has gone through and that was in sync with how we actually operate," Gabriel said. "Our operating model was very similar to Kong's. So by having partners that are compatible with the velocity and speed of our team, it's going to be a safe journey.”

With Kong, United created a centralized platform that standardizes API policies for authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and observability across decentralized teams. The platform also empowers developers through self-service portal and reusable components.

Gabriel’s team built a catalog of engineering templates — reusable API blueprints that encode resiliency patterns, compliance controls, and operational best practices. These templates are published across business portfolios, allowing development teams to build on secure, pre-approved foundations.

“Standardization doesn’t mean central control,” Gabriel said. “It means giving our teams a set of tools that help them deliver faster, more responsibly, and more consistently.”

This approach preserved the innovation culture that had long defined United’s technology teams while adding the discipline and predictability needed for enterprise scale.

The results were immediate. Engineering teams saw faster onboarding, fewer configuration errors, and improved observability across services. Governance tasks that once required manual coordination became automated through Kong’s policies and plugins. And the benefits extend all the way to the passenger experience.

“Printing a baggage label used to take one to two seconds,” Gabriel said. “Now it happens in a millisecond. That’s the kind of efficiency we’re replicating everywhere.”

The API layer also became a critical enabler for AI adoption. By placing APIs in front of models and services, United ensures that AI workloads follow the same security and monitoring standards as other applications.

“Our APIs are the abstraction layer,” Gabriel said. “They allow us to expose AI models safely, manage access, and monitor usage without disrupting innovation.”

In addition to technology gains, the partnership fostered a stronger internal culture of collaboration.  Across business portfolios, United now engages champions, engineers and product owners who help promote reuse, share learnings, and advocate for best practices.

“It’s not about who gets the credit,” Gabriel said. “It’s about creating a community where every team contributes to the next team’s success.”

With Kong as its foundation, United Airlines has built a digital platform that combines consistency, velocity, and reliability. The transformation reaches across every layer of the business, starting from developer workflows to customer experiences.

Key outcomes include:

• Enterprise-wide API governance spanning 2,200+ applications

• Millisecond-level performance improvements across mission-critical services

• 10–15% efficiency gains in development and delivery cycles

• Faster innovation cycles for AI and digital initiatives

• Stronger security posture with built-in policy enforcement

“We’ve essentially baked resiliency, compliance, and security into our engineering DNA,” Gabriel said. “Every API at United now carries our engineering signature. Kong enables that foundation.”

United has built hybrid, AI-ready architecture with Kong as the backbone. The company's AI strategy is organized around three pillars:

1. Customer experience: Leveraging AI for personalization, predictive notifications, and enhanced digital interactions.

2. Technology enablement: Using AI for developer productivity, automated testing, and observability.

3. Operational excellence: Applying AI to ensure flights depart and arrive on time, optimizing everything from crew scheduling to baggage routing.

These initiatives are supported by a responsible AI framework, a governance model ensuring every AI implementation is reviewed for compliance, safety, and ethical standards.

“With Kong, we can scale innovation responsibly,” highlighted Gabriel. “Our APIs act as the control point between experimentation and enterprise-grade reliability.”

United’s modernization has also introduced measurable business value. Faster development cycles mean teams can deliver new features earlier, improving the traveler experience and enabling new digital revenue streams.

A single API platform now serves as the foundation for everything from booking and loyalty services to emerging GenAI use cases like personalized travel recommendations and agent assist tools in contact centers.

“Our engineering and business teams work hand in hand,” said Gabriel. “Kong helps us build once and reuse everywhere, which is how we move at the speed of our customers.”

United Airlines demonstrates that modernization and innovation don’t have to come at the expense of control. By standardizing APIs with Kong, United has built an enterprise platform that moves at startup speed — one capable of powering billions of secure transactions, enabling AI safely at scale, and delivering millisecond experiences to travelers around the world.