2025 is the year AI agents will transform airline shopping

OpenAI recently announced a new shopping agent called “Operator," one of many artificial intelligence agents that will be released from the big tech companies in the next few months.

It is designed to independently perform tasks on behalf of consumers, including one of the most popular activities—online shopping. AI agents won’t just make it easier to shop for retail items, it will also enable better shopping for things like insurance, new cars and flights.

Consumers, not companies, will be the real drivers of the agent change. They’ll quickly embrace these readily available free online tools much more quickly than any airline will be able to. Consider agents as the mother of all public (internet) and private (email, documents, social media) search engines, capable of acting like a real-life assistant on overdrive: reading content, understanding images, coordinating with personal calendars, selecting locations and price limitations and even applying the right rewards options.

Generative AI gives this type of search a super-power to understand millions of data points and prioritize and present offers that align with a shopper’s needs and preferences at levels airline sites, aggregators or search engines of today can only dream about.

The way airlines expand their use of dynamic offers will also be affected by super-intelligent agents that will unearth a plethora of personally targeted deals that marketers have never anticipated.

Presenting the very best offer across every variable in real time is a goal for airlines to start working on now, not later. Creating a solid data foundation and optimizing information for agents, not just human shoppers, will deliver the highest returns for the future of flight shopping.

Airlines must be “agent ready” 

If airlines thought digital airline retailing created fragmentation across retailers and travel agencies, AI agents will feel like the “big bang,” fragmenting online flight shopping almost infinitely. Every agent acts on behalf of a unique individual, crawling sites and apps for information in real time, all the time. This is the future of the one-on-one shopping experience, with agents aggregating, prioritizing and recommending the offers.

Within several months, every day will be the equivalent of the busiest shopping day of the year. Having data to present the best offer in this shopping overload environment is key. Ultimately, airlines will need to focus on data-driven dynamic offers that agents can easily evaluate and present to their shopper. While airlines can’t pivot to AI readiness overnight, they need to get moving, shoring up their data, technology and processes to support agents. This includes several key steps:

• Centralize, clean and unlock data: Clean, recent data is the foundational requirement of agent-ready retailing. AI agents can evaluate way more than just price, origin, destination, date and time. AI can read about ancillaries, loyalty offers and also “read” images. All this data needs to be accurate and readily available to deliver information relevant for the shopper.
• Set up sites for agents: The new version of SEO is agent optimization. Airlines will need to present the right information on their website and on aggregator sites to help agents find what they need quickly and easily. No one is certain about what an “optimized” offer looks like just yet, so creating a process for continuous testing and learning is a must.
• Learn to read the traffic: Many airlines and aggregators have technology installed to kick out bots. Airlines will need to learn to tell the difference between unwanted crawlers and agents shopping on behalf of a consumer to make sure they don’t accidentally turn away sales opportunities. 
• Embrace dynamic offers: Dynamic offers will be critical for providing something that the agent considers relevant. Offers should be based on shopper history and be competitive at every level, not just at the price level.

Building the new flight retailing supply chain 

As they make these technical changes, airlines also need to be thinking about the relationships and processes that drive their business. Commercially, airlines need to rethink how they talk to their customers through every different channel. Right now, airlines are used to customers visiting a website or an app. Those days are numbered for many consumers. They will ask their phone to shop for them by asking, “Find the best flight for me to go to Turkey over spring break in March.” They can expect to get perfectly sorted offers for their unique needs based on millions of data points. That agent experience becomes the new interface.

Today, airlines also know who their travel agents and OTAs are, but that, too, will change. Airlines need to know who they need to talk to to be present and rank high with anonymous agents. Agents will not just call up a GDS (global distribution service) and get a tracking number, even Meta has an ID with IATA (International Air Transport Association). With agents, the paper trail is a lot harder and there are no IDs for agents.

Consider the cautionary tale of one airline that didn’t update their processes after Travelocity was created and online flight shopping took off. The airline credited every Travelocity sale to the salesperson who covered Austin, Texas, even though the sales were from customers across the country and were just routed through Travelocity’s data center in Texas. The sales rep was paid for the online sales for two years before the airline figured it out and changed their commission policy to accommodate online sales. Airlines cannot let similar issues happen as AI agents upend today’s retail supply chain.

While airlines can’t change in a day, they need to accept the fact that flight shopping will. In 2025, airlines will see their consumers shift dramatically. Now is the time to learn about agents, understand what it will take to optimize the shopping experience through agents and create a plan to set up data, technology and processes that will help with the next wave of airline retailing transformation.