The research scout boat ahead of a very big ship.

I lead the Digital Lab at Turkish Technology — the research team that scouts ahead of Turkish Airlines. Our job is to explore emerging technologies and turn the promising ones into things the airline actually ships.

The clearest example: we built one of the first enterprise MCP platforms in the world, connecting an airline's core services — flight search, booking, baggage, city guides — directly to AI assistants, with interactive branded cards rendered inside the chat. It made Turkish Airlines one of the first airlines live on both ChatGPT and Claude. One backend, one tool spec, every major AI agent.

The shift I write and speak about

Booking engines are moving from forms to conversations. Full-page web is giving way to chat-native UI. Distribution is becoming a question of which capabilities you expose, not which channel you own. Recent talks: the keynote at Future of Aviation 2026 in Helsinki ("Chat Is the New Booking Engine") and "Building Chat-Native UI with MCP Apps" at AWS's Twin Strikers event in Istanbul.

Before this role

Seventeen years across the stack. CTO at Popupsmart, where we shipped LiveChatAI in under two months. Lead engineer at BlueReceipt. A government-funded startup of my own. And earlier years at Turkish Airlines building Boti — the airline's chatbot, live on WhatsApp and Messenger years before LLMs made conversation easy — and leading the mobile app's cloud migration to AWS. Earlier still: ad engines serving 150M requests a day, and anti-money-laundering systems for Turkey's Financial Investigation Unit.

That mix — founder instincts inside an airline headed for 100 million passengers a year — is what the Digital Lab runs on.

Beyond work

I'm a father of two, and my wife's support is the quiet infrastructure behind everything above. I give seminars on communication and relationships — an interest in humans that turns out to be surprisingly useful in engineering leadership.

If you're working on agentic AI, MCP, or airline retailing, I take a small number of advisory conversations and speaking invitations — book 15 minutes.