AI in the aftermarket, for a room that already uses it

Las Vegas, June 2026. Block Aero spent three days at the 2026 ASA AFRA Conference, the joint annual meeting of the Aviation Suppliers Association and the Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association, held at the Four Seasons Resort Las Vegas. Founder & CEO Todd Siena, cofounder and CTO & COO Adam Siena, and cofounder and CCO Lucas Pinoli attended, and Block Aero supported the conference as a sponsor.

The company had two slots on the program. Todd Siena led Workshop 10, “AI in the Aftermarket: Threats You Can’t Avoid, Opportunities You Can’t Miss,” a 90-minute session in the conference’s workshop series for which ASA members received training credits. The team also presented with AFRA on traceability and the AFRA-CAAC Registry.

01 · The show of handsAdoption is not the problem

The workshop opened with a question to the room. The audience was mainly asset traders, airlines, and parts distributors, and almost all of them already use at least one AI software tool. Half use two or more. In this industry, adoption has happened.

The results are the problem. A majority of attendees described the same three symptoms: output that varies from one session to the next, results that get worse the longer they work, and inaccurate answers that appear at random with no warning. Nobody had explained to them why.

02 · The foundationsWhy the answers get worse

The reason is mostly mechanical. Every model works inside a context window, its working memory for a session. Every file opened, every reply, and every tool result lands in that one space, and the model weighs all of it equally. Fill it past roughly two-thirds and quality quietly drops: earlier decisions are forgotten, answers turn vague, and stale material crowds out the question actually being asked. That is what a “random” wrong answer usually is.

The fixes are habits, not software. Members left with a one-page field guide built around four of them.

1. 01

   Start fresh

   A new session for a new task. A clean desk beats a clever one.

2. 02

   Compact

   Summarize a long thread and carry the summary forward, not the transcript.

3. 03

   Delegate

   Hand a bounded job to a helper with its own working memory. Take back only the answer.

4. 04

   Right-size the model

   Match the model to the task. Don’t pay frontier prices for a lookup.

03 · The breakoutsWhere members want to start

Forty of the ninety minutes belonged to the room. Breakout groups worked through threats, opportunities, governance, and people, then brought back three bullets each. When the question was where to apply AI first, records management and trace came up in nearly every group: turning teardown packages, work orders, and scanned tags into structured data that can be checked. That is the job Block Aero’s Agentic Records Manager was built for.

The threat discussion was just as concrete. A “spot the fake” exercise put four part tags on screen, three of them AI-generated with a single letter or digit changed. The room performed at about the level of chance, which matches the published human average for detecting a well-made forgery. The point was not that inspectors are failing. It is that visual inspection is no longer a complete check, and provenance has to be verifiable rather than visual.

The people discussion ran longest. If AI does the entry-level version of the work, where does the next generation of experts come from, and which skills erode fastest? The groups did not settle it, and the workshop did not pretend to. It did land one governance point with the quality managers in the room: an organization that has done ISO 27001 already has the registers and controls it needs to govern AI, and should build on that framework rather than start a new one.

“Almost everyone in that room is already using AI. What they had not been given is the operating manual. Once you understand that the model has a working memory with a hard ceiling, the inconsistency stops looking random and starts looking manageable.”

Todd Siena · Founder & CEO, Block Aero

04 · The second sessionTraceability and the AFRA-CAAC Registry

Block Aero’s second presentation, with AFRA, covered traceability and the AFRA-CAAC program. The registry records recovered parts and their source aircraft as private, permissioned, cryptographically secure records that buyers, owners, and authorities can query. It is the qualifying overseas registration platform for aircraft, engines, and dismantled parts sold into China under the CAAC–AFRA memorandum of understanding, open to AFRA members who disassemble under the Best Management Practice Guide.

For the ASA-accredited distributors in the room, the same record does a second job. A part with a complete, verifiable back-to-birth history sells faster and at a better price than the same part with gaps. The registry turns trace from an audit cost into a selling point.

05 · The week in contextCertified by ASA, partnered with AFRA

The conference came three days after Block Aero’s information security management system was certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by the Aviation Suppliers Association Certification Body. For ASA members, that means the platform holding their records is assessed by the same body that accredits their own quality systems. On the AFRA side, the conversations in Las Vegas fed into the five-year renewal of the Block Aero–AFRA partnership announced in September.

To the members, fellow sponsors, and staff of ASA and AFRA who made the week, and to everyone who stayed in Workshop 10 until the last readout: thank you. See you next year.