How do you ensure the legal function supports business resilience during periods of uncertainty or disruption?

Supporting business resilience requires the legal function to shift from reactive advisers to embedded strategic partners. In global aerospace – where geopolitical conflicts, sudden sanctions, and supply chain disruptions like tensions in the Strait of Hormuz intersect daily – resilience is built on foresight, scenario planning, and agility.

The first step to this is recognising that legal is there to help protect the business’ licence to operate and to grow. So embedded in our core purpose is understanding what types of events or actions can impact this. Therefore we recently merged the Airbus Public Affairs team into the Legal function, giving us end to end sight of the policy and regulatory cycle, up to date information on political decisions and the ability to directly advocate on issues which are impacting us.

This means we are stronger and more resilient because it drives cooperation across the business, forces our policy and legal teams to work together to better provide advice to the CEO and Executive Committee and widens the perspective of our legal teams. This works both ways – we also have to be close to the business and understand what is happening inside Airbus in order to be successful. So we embed our legal counsels where key decisions happen – within the business divisions, and alongside our engineers as they innovate.

Secondly, having a laser focus on compliance means that we are confident in the way we conduct our business. There is deep resilience in knowing that you have acted above the law and in line with best practice. It is a competitive advantage for us.

Lastly, ensuring that we develop the right tools within Airbus’ governance to help us to navigate complexity. Whether that was setting up a Trade Steering Committee to anticipate tariffs following the US President’s reelection, engaging directly with US Trade specialists ahead of the election, or establishing a new geopolitical advisory Council to advise the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee on the long term impacts of geopolitics on Airbus’ strategy, footprint and, of course, our licence to operate and grow.

How do you see AI and automation reshaping the legal profession, and how are you leveraging technology in your own legal team?

AI and Automation have the potential to reduce the time legal professionals spend on the routine, and to allow us to focus significantly more on the novel and complex, where we add the highest value. We have seen individuals using these tools to increase their personal productivity across our teams and we are working now to ensure these capability enhancements are captured, shared and rolled out more systematically as enterprise-grade foundations that augment human judgment.

At Airbus, we view technology as a core enabler of operational success. Since 2025, our teams have experimented with native AI tools like Google Gemini for contract analysis, export control classification, and IP monitoring. To transition from fragmented Proofs of Concept to a scalable enterprise deployment, we launched Project L.I.F.T. (L Innovation, Function Transformation). Through this initiative, we are auditing our AI maturity against industry benchmarks, mapping ‘As-Is’ to ‘To-Be’ operating models that resolve data security and sovereignty constraints, and upskilling our workforce to ensure our transformation is secure, scalable, and value-driven.