How Jet Agency fuels innovation with Zapier and AI

Most people book flights directly from an airline’s website, a travel search engine, or their credit card’s online travel portal—if you’re flying commercial, that is. 

If you need a private flight, you might call on a charter broker like Jet Agency. 

“We connect clients with people that own airplanes so they can fly privately,” explains James Sperry, Executive Vice President of Biz Ops at Jet Agency.

To do that, Jet Agency uses its proprietary software—known as the “Grid”—to book flights, manage leads, and handle other business operations. But as is true for many custom apps, changes were often complex to make and slow to launch. 

“While our system is super powerful, it definitely takes a decent amount of building if we want to make any kind of improvements on it,” James says.

How Jet Agency automates proprietary systems without code

Apps that don’t have their own API or webhook features make it nearly impossible to connect with other apps without a developer. The Grid lacked both. Anytime James wanted to test something out, he faced slowdowns and roadblocks going through their old development team.

At first, James used Zapier for marketing automation and saw a major improvement in Jet Agency’s marketing spend. 

“It’s made our marketing accounts successful because we can get conversion data to Google quickly and accurately,” James says. “That just saves us a ton of money.” 

Then, when James took over operations, he saw the perfect opportunity to introduce Zapier to the charter broker’s three-person developer team—all fresh faces to Jet Agency—to blaze a new path. 

Jump ahead:

Build a bridge to connect proprietary data

Any app that relies on data has databases under the hood to store everything, like contact information for a customer relationship manager (CRM) tool. 

Developers typically use SQL to retrieve and update data in those backend databases. Instead, Jet Agency uses Zapier’s MySQL and PostgreSQL integrations to get their proprietary software to talk to other apps.

“There’s a lot of these temporary [Google Sheets] that we’ll build to store all this data until we know that the concept is going to work,” explains James. “Once we know it’ll work, then we’ll build it into a real [SQL] table so we don’t bog down our production databases.”

The team uses this data bridge to do things like resurrect what they call “zombie leads.” 

“Our aviation agents can request batches of clients that flew with them in the past, but haven’t booked in a while,” James says. “Zapier lets us pull that data, loop through it, and upload all the leads into their lead management system.”

Create an AI-powered teammate

This bridge also allows Jet Agency to use AI, while controlling how it accesses and uses data from their proprietary systems. With OpenAI’s Assistants API, they built a new AI-powered teammate: Jetson Booker. 

“He has a whole persona of this cool airline pilot guy,” James says. “It’s just a more fun way to interact with our data.” 

For example, teammates can ping Jetson Booker in Slack to ask questions or search for “empty leg” flights within their database to book a client’s trip. 

Let that teammate wrangle quotes and bookings

When a client needs to book a private flight, Jet Agency sources quotes from plane operators to find a suitable match. Unfortunately, operators don’t send quotes in a consistent format. Some might send a PDF file or even raw text. 

“When we’re looking for an aircraft for one of our clients, we might send out 50 quote requests to plane operators for one client,” James explains. 

With the sheer volume and $70 million dollars of flights on the line, Jet Agency once needed an entire department to handle sourcing. 

Now, Jetson Booker takes that on instead. Using Zapier’s ChatGPT integration, Jet Agency dispatches Jetson in a Zap to parse new quotes as soon as they arrive in Gmail. After some data clean-up using Code by Zapier and Formatter, the Zap drops the quote into their proprietary software. 

“That saved our sales agents hundreds of hours not having to dig through email,” says James.

Igniting a culture of experimentation

With Zapier as the fuel, Jet Agency can use its best resource—its people—to find clever solutions to some of its toughest problems.