From PRM to Published Author: Airlines, AI, and the Art of the Possible

QKaryn, most people at telos know you as our resident airline pricing and revenue management expert. For readers who are new to you, can you set the stage?

AI spent 22 years at Sun Country Airlines, starting in operations in 2003, then moving into network planning, and eventually landing in pricing and revenue management, which is where I built most of my career. Over time I moved into leadership roles which included building budgets, creating long-range forecasts, leading system transitions, managing teams. I was always very interested in the underlying data and systems and always wanted to make it better. That last part is what eventually led me here.

Sun Country will always hold special place in my heart. It was founded in 1982 by a scrappy group of pilots and flight attendants who essentially built an airline from nothing. The story of how that happened is remarkable, and it became a lot more relevant to my life than I ever expected.

QHow did AI first enter the picture for you?

AIn May of 2024, my boss at the time passed an invitation along to me almost as an afterthought. He had been invited to represent airlines at a weekend summit on AI in the travel industry, co-hosted by a tech giant and a major travel industry tech provider. He did not want to go, so he said I could have his spot if I wanted it.

I wanted it.

The summit was held on a cruise to the Bahamas, which sounds like a boondoggle, but the substance of the weekend impacted me deeply. The most energized voice in every room was Jason Kelly, who had founded and exited an RM startup. His mind is always about 10 years in the future. He understood what the emerging AI tools could do for airlines, and could not stop talking about the possibilities. He introduced me to Claude and ChatPRD, and over the course of that weekend my mind raced ahead to: we could do this at Sun Country, and this, and this, and this.

I came home ready to build something amazing, but ran directly into a wall.

QWhat happened?

AMy boss was not interested. To him, the answer to every analytical problem was a bigger spreadsheet. I put together a proposal for an AI-assisted forecasting improvement project, tried to get it into the budget, and watched it get shot down in a budget meeting in a way that was, to put it diplomatically, discouraging.

In January of 2025 I resigned from Sun Country. By February I was a Head of Product contractor working under the UpLabs umbrella as the venture took shape. That venture eventually became telos, and I came on first as Domain Architect and am now AI Solutions Architect.

QAnd then something unexpected happened. You wrote a book.

AIt is still a little surreal to say that out loud.

When I joined the company, I had access to every AI tool we were using and exploring for our dev work. I was using Claude constantly: for writing product requirement documents, for doing research, for figuring out how to use GitHub and VS Code as a non-engineer-turning-engineer, for drafting and thinking and problem-solving. I became fluent in how to work with these dev tools because I finally had the time, the mandate, and the encouragement to go all the way in.

So when I heard about the interviews, I immediately saw what was possible.

QTell us about the interviews.

AI was starting to write some articles on the history of Sun Country for our Substack, and I reached out to Jim Olsen, my former boss and one of the airline’s founders. He mentioned that Maggie, one of the original Sun Country flight attendants, had spent years interviewing the founding team: the people who were in the room when the airline was born, who risked everything and built something out of sheer stubbornness and belief. About 13 audio interviews were sitting on a flash drive. Maggie and her co-interviewer Jennifer had tried to find interest from authors, but had hit a dead end.

When I learned this, I told Maggie: that is a book. She said, oh, well, maybe it’s a pamphlet. I said, Maggie, that is absolutely a book, and I’m going to figure out how to write it.

QWalk us through how you actually did that. Because writing a book while holding down a demanding role at a startup is not a small thing.

AHaha, yah, and while being a single parent of three teenagers!

But that’s exactly the point, and it’s what I want people to understand. In a traditional world, this project would have taken years, and it probably would have fizzled out. I would have lost steam and those stories would have stayed on that flash drive.

Here’s how it played out. First, I used a transcription tool to convert all 25 hours of audio into text documents. That step, which once would have consumed hundreds of hours, took me about an hour. Then I set up a project in Claude, which is essentially a container that holds everything you give it and remembers it all. I loaded in all 13 transcribed interviews. I wrote detailed instructions for the project about my writing style, my voice, and the purpose of the book.

From there I asked Claude to help me build a chronological timeline of events from across all the interviews, since each person remembered things differently and out of order. Then I asked it to suggest a chapter structure. Then I asked it to identify the key stories I needed to tell in each chapter. I just wanted a shell. The words were going to be mine.

Then I put on my headphones and listened to the voices of the founders for myself. I felt connected to the interviewees as I immersed myself in their stories. I opened the shell and wrote the book. Claude was alongside me the whole time as a research partner, a fact-checker, thesaurus, and an editorial sounding board. The final chapter “Beyond Sun Country” was written mainly based on content from obituaries. As I read through them that morning to write the chapter, I sat at my computer crying as if I had lost friends, even though I didn’t know any of them except Jim.

A second tool, Writer, helped me with proofreading and formatting. I used Vercel v0 to design the book’s visual timeline. When it came time to pitch to publishers, I went back to Claude and asked it to help me understand what a professional pitch package required, and then I built one.

I sent the pitch. I got a response almost immediately.

QThe book, Minnesota’s Phoenix: From the Ashes of Braniff to Sun Country Airlines, was published in April of 2026. But the months leading up to publication had some remarkable moments that the book’s own story could not have anticipated.

AThat’s an understatement!

In November of 2025, I gave an early manuscript to Jim Olsen, the founder I mentioned earlier and someone I have enormous admiration for. He held his own story in his hands. That mattered deeply to me.

In January of 2026, as I was preparing to hand the final manuscript to the editor, the news broke that Allegiant Air was acquiring Sun Country. The airline that the founders had built from nothing was being absorbed into another carrier. The book suddenly felt more urgent and more important, as a piece of living history.

Then in February, Jim passed away.

And then in April, Jim was posthumously inducted into the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame. Maggie, Jennifer, and I attended the ceremony as guests of Sun Country. It was such an honor to be there and to have the book featured on Jim’s table.

QThe book has been getting real attention. What does that look like right now?

AWe have been interviewed by local television and radio stations, which has been exciting and, to be honest, a little uncomfortable for someone who is much more comfortable writing than speaking. We have book talks coming up at various venues around Minnesota, including one I am especially looking forward to at Art in Motion in my hometown of Holdingford, MN, this July. A press release is going out on PR Newswire in the coming weeks as well, and I have a personal website that has more information, karynfernandes.com.

It is Maggie’s project at its heart. She started this years ago because she knew these stories deserved to be told, and because the founders were getting older and the window was closing. Jennifer came alongside Maggie with the encouragement she needed to make the interviews happen. Then, years later, I happened to arrive with the right tools at the right time.

QLast question: what does any of this have to do with telos?

AEverything, I think.

The conventional wisdom around AI is that it makes you more efficient. That is true, but it is the least interesting thing about it. What AI actually did for me was make me capable of something I would not have attempted otherwise. I am not a trained author. I am an airline commercial team expert who loves to write. The gap between those two things was closed by tools that understood what I needed, moved at the speed of my thinking, and never asked me to spend time on the parts that were not the point.

That is precisely what we are building at telos for airline commercial teams. Revenue management analysts and pricing managers are not spending their time doing the work that matters most to them. They are buried in data they cannot make sense of, waiting on reports that are already outdated, and making decisions without the full picture. We want to close that gap the same way these tools closed the gap for me: not by replacing the expertise, but by clearing the path so the experts can think strategically.

The people who build great airlines deserve better tools. So do the analysts who are trying to make sense of what’s happening in their markets every single day.

Minnesota’s Phoenix: From the Ashes of Braniff to Sun Country Airlines is available now.

Learn more about telos at telos.ai.