Charu Jain Is one of TIME's 2026 Executives of the Year: Tech and Data - Time Magazine

Charu Jain has worked in aviation technology for more than 30 years. But when Alaska Airlines acquired Hawaiian Airlines in a $1.9 billion deal, she was given a task never done before in the U.S.: preserve two 90-year-old consumer brands while operating them on common underlying technology.

“Imagine a guest that's traveling for a wedding from New York to Maui, and they're going to be on an Alaska plane for part of the time, and then a Hawaiian plane,” she says. “How do you really make that journey seamless for the guest so that they are not navigating two different reservations, two different apps, two different airport experiences?”

The 18-month effort involved moving millions of bookings and passenger records, updating multiple systems, and intense collaboration across the two organizations. Jain once considered becoming a diplomat “because I was just fascinated by how people and countries and organizations come together to solve very complex problems,” she says. Her role today requires similar skills, she says: “Technology is just diplomacy at scale.”