American Airlines: from green screen to AI agents
AA architect: don't just put MCP on your APIs | Praga PrakasamAA turns 100 this year, and it still runs on Sabre, a 1960s-era reservation system built when AI was still sci-fi. Now leadership wants agents shipped every 90 days. How do you move that fast, and avoid AI hallucinations, all atop a legacy system of record? Praga had the solution in his back pocket, a graph API ready to become their agent context layer.
In this episode I talk with Praga Prakasam, Senior Principal Architect and 13-year veteran at American Airlines. Praga owns their API platform and recently was tapped to accelerate the company's customer-facing AI agent efforts. We talk through the challenges he faced, why AA has bet on GraphQL, and why he thinks teams putting MCP in front of their existing API endpoints are repeating a mistake they already made once with backends-for-frontends.
He argues that agents are probabilistic, so what sits underneath them has to be deterministic and connected, that authorization is best done at the field level, and that persisted queries are how you restrict what an agent can call.
*In our conversation, we get into:*
1. Why American Airlines used GraphQL to insulate itself from decades-old legacy tech
2. What an AI agent needs that REST APIs cannot give it
3. The backend-for-frontend mistake teams are repeating with MCP
4. Why getting an agent to work on your laptop doesn't cut it for prod
5. How shipping agent tools directly atop your graph saves time
6. How he stops an agent from canceling your reservation
Watch to hear why he feels so vindicated in his deep platform investment.
Praga Prakasam, Senior Principal Architect, American Airlines.
*Where to find Praga Prakasam:*
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pragaprakasam/
*Where to find Dan Boerner:*
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dboerner/
- Email the show: onthegraph@apollographql.com
*Referenced in this episode:*
- Apollo MCP Server: https://www.apollographql.com/docs/apollo-mcp-server
*In this episode, we cover:*
0:00 Cold open
0:29 Praga, Sabre, and 100 years of American Airlines
1:42 Modernizing around a system you don't control
4:15 What changed for the traveler experience
6:52 Then the AI moment arrived
8:52 Why they tapped an API architect to lead AI efforts
11:57 Agents need deterministic answers
13:41 Shipping agent tools without writing new code
14:18 The MCP mistake almost everyone makes
19:06 What a long bet feels like when it pays off
22:26 Why security is the part that ships it
If you're working to power your AI efforts and APIs are in the way, email me and I'll connect you with other API champions like Praga — onthegraph@apollographql.com
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