A predawn terminal hums like a living instrument. Escalators breathe, gates blink awake, cameras study the surge at security. What looks like choreography is really computation. In modern aviation, the passenger journey is only as graceful as the data that moves beneath it. Resilience is the new craft: systems that sense early, respond quickly, and keep experiences human even when conditions turn hard.
This sets the stage for CNBC-TV18 and Cisco’s Digital Resilience Dialogues, a cross-industry series on building secure, agile, future-ready enterprises. The opener features Jeet Adani, Director of Adani Airports, with Daisy Chittilapilly, President, Cisco India & SAARC, unpacking how India’s airports are being transformed into intelligent, hyperconnected ecosystems.
Reimagining Airports as Ecosystems
Airports were once waystations with runways and retail. They now behave like miniature cities where airlines, security agencies, immigration, concessionaires, ground handlers, and app developers must act in concert. Jeet Adani’s brief recognizes that reality. The portfolio is being retrofitted for it. Navi Mumbai, designed digital-first from the ground up, treats every subsystem as part of a common nervous system so service quality feels consistent at the curb, at the gate, and everywhere in between.
Data as a Strategic Asset
At the heart of the program sits an AIO platform that functions as an airport brain. It ingests live signals from assets and stakeholders, correlates them, and feeds decisions back into operations. Pair that with a digital twin and you get a planning surface that anticipates surges, routes people out of emerging bottlenecks, and assigns staff and bays where they will matter most. The result is efficiency that comes from intelligence rather than just square footage. In Ahmedabad, months of sensor-led analysis informed a redesign of immigration and security that cut waits with minimal capital expense. The playbook is now informing new terminals across the network
A simpler, more human journey
The passenger-facing side is quietly radical. Biometrics becomes the core identity so entry, check-in, security, and boarding feel like a single motion rather than four separate checkpoints. The same digital rails carry retail and payments, which turns meandering dwelling time into a more deliberate, personalized experience. When orchestration is good, technology fades and the airport feel calm even at peak load.
Embedding Security in Design
Delivering such experiences requires a secure foundation. Daisy Chittilapilly, President of Cisco India & SAARC, has brought Cisco’s global expertise to the partnership with Adani Airports. She emphasizes resilience by design, where security is embedded from the ground up rather than an afterthought. Cisco’s programmable network fabric ensures that dozens of subsystems can operate in sync, while isolating potential breaches to prevent broader disruption. Edge computing further strengthens the architecture. By processing data where it is generated, latency is reduced, privacy is protected, and decisions are made faster. The result is an infrastructure that secures operations while supporting efficiency, non-aero revenue growth, and seamless passenger services.
Sustainability as a system
Sustainability, in this playbook, is treated as system design. The brief is to build airports that conserve by default, where every watt, liter, and minute has a purpose. The visible moves are easy to spot, like electrifying airside fleets and shifting more loads to cleaner power, but the real gains come from orchestration. Energy use is tuned by data so HVAC and lighting respond to actual occupancy rather than fixed schedules, charging cycles align with flight turns and grid conditions, and predictive maintenance keeps assets efficient before they drift into waste. Scheduling, too, becomes a sustainability tool, smoothing peaks that strain equipment and staff while preserving comfort for travelers. Cisco’s approach tracks the same arc, treating efficient networks as climate work, because the cleanest kilowatt is the one a well-designed platform never asks for. The result is not a slogan but a sensation: quieter aprons, cleaner air, calmer terminals, and an operation that moves with intent.
Growth Through Resilience
There is a revenue story nested inside the reliability story. If the AIO platform is the brain, the Adani One app and partner systems are the fingertips. The same telemetry that smooths a bottleneck can shape a retail moment or a mobility option at exactly the right time, for exactly the right traveler, with exactly the right level of friction. This is how resilience pays twice: once in predictability, again in possibility.
Why India, why now?
India’s aviation market is growing rapidly, and the work being done isn’t about copying someone else’s plan. It’s about creating one. That involves designing resilience into the plan, viewing data as infrastructure, breaking down silos by default, building security into the plan from day one, and aligning operations with measurable and defensible climate goals. If done well, an airport stops feeling like a machine passengers must endure and instead feels like hospitality that happens to fly.
Most travelers will never see the dashboards that make this real. They will know it in the small gifts of time and calm. A line that keeps moving. A jet bridge that arrives without fuss. A notification that lands before a worry does. The future-ready airport does not announce itself; it simply works, and in working well, returns the journey to the traveler.
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