Key Take-Aways from the IATA World Safety & Operations Conference 2025
By Mark Lennon, Principal Product Manager, Comply365
IATA WSOC 2025 (IATA World Safety and Operations Conference) underscored that aviation safety and operational excellence rely increasingly on anticipation, adaptability, and the intelligent use of data. As regulatory environments, technologies, and operational complexities continue to evolve, integrated platforms that bring together documentation, safety insights, and training workflows will play a key role in helping operators stay aligned, informed, and resilient.
This year’s conference reaffirmed the importance of continued innovation across safety, operations, and training – and the value of ensuring that these domains work together in a unified, data-informed intelligent ecosystem.
Comply365’s Mark Lennon, an aviation safety expert and current Principal Product Manager Safety at Comply365, shares his insights on the key themes emerging from IATA WSOC 2025 and how they mirror Comply365’s unified platform strategy.
Key Themes and Industry Challenges
The IATA WSOC conference centered around three major imperatives shaping the future of aviation safety and operations:
- Defending Global Standards: Regulatory fragmentation and GNSS interference continue to challenge the consistency of global frameworks.
- Embedding a Strong Safety Culture: Leadership, communication, and accountability and investing in latest technologies such as AI remain foundational to sustained safety performance.
- Turning Data into Foresight: Airlines are increasingly focused on moving from reactive analysis to proactive insights supported by AI and machine learning.
As Mark Searle noted, leadership, adherence to standards, and smarter use of data will define industry resilience in the years ahead.
Safety Stream: Evolving Practices and Technology
Safety sessions highlighted a clear shift toward proactive, data-driven safety management:
- Proactive Risk Management: Growing interest in anticipating hazards before they escalate.
- Risk-Based IOSA Audits: A move toward more meaningful, insight-driven oversight.
- AI in Safety Management: Early use cases show potential for AI to enhance pattern recognition and trend identification within SMS data.
These themes closely align with the continued evolution of integrated SMS platforms – such as SafetyManager365 – bringing together reporting, risk tools, alerts, and analytics – to support more proactive safety strategies. By integrating AI-driven predictions, as we do with the Comply365 CoAnalyst, and cross-domain data correlation, Comply365 can help airlines move decisively from reactive fixes to proactive safety strategies.
Crisis Management: Strengthening Response and Resilience
The Crisis Management track emphasized the need for airlines to ensure their crisis response frameworks are both accurate and adaptable:
- Clear Communication in ERPs: Reducing misinformation and ensuring reliability under pressure.
- Post-Event Support: Establishing structured processes for crew and passenger care.
- Scalable Response Models: Preparing for diverse disruptions ranging from geopolitical instability to cyber incidents.
These conversations reinforce the importance of reliable, accessible, and well-managed operational content – especially during time-critical situations when information accuracy is paramount.
Within Comply365’s ContentManager365, AI-powered semantic search, empowers crews to find situationally critical information quickly – it understands the context and intent behind a query – not just literal words, providing more accurate search results for improved decisioning.
Additionally, when operations are connected to real-time safety insights, this empowers airlines with the operational linkage that crisis teams need during fast-moving events.
Emerging Risks and Broader Conversations
Informal discussions across IATA WSOC brought forward several evolving areas of focus:
- Operational Readiness at New Airports: Ensuring strong coordination and hazard awareness.
- Understanding Cockpit Events: Using advanced analytics and flight data monitoring to clarify incident factors.
- Integrating Documentation, Training, and Risk: The convergence of content, safety systems, and AI is increasingly viewed as essential to operational resilience.
As Willie Walsh observed, evolving technologies – including AI – will strengthen the industry’s ability to navigate emerging risks.
IATA WSOC 2025 made it clear: aviation safety and operational excellence now depend on anticipation, adaptability, and integrated data ecosystems. The industry increasingly sees the convergence of documentation, training, and safety management as essential – not optional.
The opportunities are significant:
- Leverage AI to unify safety, operations, and training data into a single predictive ecosystem.
- Deliver proactive insights across manuals, reports, training records, and operational workflows.
- Enable operators to meet rising regulatory complexity with confidence and consistency.
- Strengthen resilience through connected operations.
- Scale safety culture leveraging the right technology and better use of data.
With 500+ aviation customers worldwide, Comply365 is uniquely positioned to bring AI-enabled, cross-domain intelligence to the industry – helping airlines to modernize their safety culture, simplify regulatory complexity, and operate with greater foresight.
Our unified platform connecting operations, safety and training via ContentManager365, SafetyManager365, and TrainingManager365 empower airlines to operate with greater foresight and continuously enhance operational performance, supporting Comply365’s mission to help the industry achieve new levels of operational excellence.
For more information on how Comply365 is making this vision a reality, contact us today.
