About BAT Summit

What BAT Summit is

Business aviation's technology buyers and the vendors who serve them meet for a single day of back-to-back demos. Vendors demo in glass pods and pitch live from a central stage with open Q&A and audience polls, an AI hackathon ships real prototypes, and a cocktail evening opens it all the night before. Buyers pick their vendors from the directory ahead of time, schedule their demos, and leave with a shortlist instead of a tote bag of brochures.

The inaugural summit is in September 2027 at the Montreal Science Centre in Montreal's Old Port. BAT Summit is independent and vendor-neutral: it is not owned or controlled by any vendor on the floor.

An event by BAT Pros

BAT Pros (Business Aviation Technology Professionals) is the professional organization for business aviation technology: the member companies that build the systems this industry runs on and the professionals who run them. Membership is free for vendors and professionals alike. BAT Pros publishes the business-aviation technology vendor directory the summit is built around and holds BAT Summit once a year as its annual event.

Who is behind it

BAT Pros was founded by two people from inside business aviation, and there is no outside owner. Ben Thomas is the founder of ForIT and a fractional CTO and CIO for airlines and charter operators. Shaan Bhanji is a business-aviation executive who leads the events side of the summit; Shaan's company, VOL, builds the reservation, workforce and regulatory software that Canadian business aviation runs on.

Powered by ForIT

ForIT is a managed service provider for aviation, with fractional CTO and CIO leadership and a software development team that builds software for airlines and charter operators. ForIT designs, builds and runs the BAT Summit and BAT Pros websites, including the vendor directory, registration and ticketing, and handles support for both sites.

Questions

Straight answers are in the FAQ. For anything else, write to the team from the home page.