IBM and EgyptAir Tourism and Duty Free Co. have entered into a new agreement in which the airline will leverage IBM Cloud to scale and modernize EgyptAir Duty Free back-end operations and host its SAP Travel Retail System.

By adopting IBM Cloud, EgyptAir will also leverage IBM Watson Assistant to create an AI virtual agent to help transform their travelers’ shopping experience.

With a hybrid cloud approach from IBM, EgyptAir Duty Free will migrate its ERP workload to IBM Cloud while staying connected and fully integrated with the Frequent-Flyer Program of EgyptAir Airlines and Star Alliance companies to provide shopping services from EgyptAir’s duty free outlets and help attract new customers.

For example, EgyptAir Duty Free customers will make all payment transactions through a secured point of sale that is part of IBM Cloud infrastructure.

With IBM Cloud, EgyptAir can leverage IBM’s security capabilities, which can include confidential computing and encryption capabilities.

This gives enterprises the ability to retain control of their own encryption keys so IBM clients are the only ones who can control access to their data, the company added.