When Southwest Airlines' operational meltdown happened during the 2022 holiday season, its outdated crew-scheduling software was one of the culprits.
Now, as the airline develops a system that will replace that legacy software, it is deploying agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to speed the software build-out and accelerate testing.
Southwest and other airlines have begun experimenting with a range of agentic AI uses. And there's much more to come.
Agentic AI may be best known to travel advisors for its capabilities to independently execute bookings and itinerary changes. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for potential airline uses, according to Amadeus. The travel tech company is building out or exploring a suite of agentic AI capabilities for its airline retailing and reservations platforms.
Teams of AI agents could be deployed to assist with network development, marketing, improving turn times and managing disruptions. Software build-outs, like the one Southwest is doing, are another major opportunity.
Ghaleb Rostom, Amadeus' SVP of product management for airlines, said that AI agents offer the promise of breaking through the silos that often exist between various airline departments.
For example, he said that agentic AI could identify underperforming routes, then develop advertising campaigns for those routes, creating a link between an airline's route-planning and marketing teams.
Alaska Airlines' AI initiatives
For now, airline deployments are largely a bit more cautious as agentic AI technology improves.
One early adopter has been Alaska Airlines, the launch partner for Volantio's Vector agentic AI platform. Volantio is focused on helping airlines reallocate demand and maximize post-booking revenue.
Vector's primary capability is to enable airlines to more easily manage overbooked flights well before customers arrive at the airport, said Volantio CEO Azim Barodawala. Airlines can also use it to incentivize customers to switch from peak-hour flights to off-peak times when airlines see the potential to sell the vacated peak-hour seats at higher prices.
With the tool, airlines can task agentic AI agents to identify flights that are overbooked and proactively reach out to customers with compensation offers.
The agentic AI agents can also take more specific instructions, such as to avoid making offers to connecting passengers whose itineraries would be disrupted by a change. Or they could be asked to monitor other potential operational pitfalls, such as midsummer Denver flights, when the combination of heat and altitude can make liftoff more sluggish, leading to payload restrictions.
Volantio's older, preagentic AI system could also do these types of tasks, but much less efficiently, said Barodawala.
"This would have taken Volantio and the client 10 times longer in the past," he said.
Future Vector capabilities are to include flight-disruption management, he added.
At Southwest, the airline is using Amazon Web Services' Kiro platform to build agentic AI systems, said Justin Bundick, Southwest's vice president of AI and intelligence platforms.
One function of those systems is pulling together data sets, freeing up Southwest's business intelligence analysts to spend most of their time analyzing, Bundick said.
On the customer-facing side of the business, Southwest has made its chatbot agentic. The technology digs into customer questions and pulls specific answers from airline policy documents, said Bundick, an upgrade from generic answers and links.
In the long run, agentic AI will lead to overarching efficiency gains, which will show up on airlines' profit-and-loss statements, said Bundick.
Still, carriers will have to be careful in managing changes if they hope to achieve success, he said, especially in training their workforce on interacting with agentic AI applications.
"It's like interacting with a young employee in your organization," Bundick said. "You have to provide guidance, you have to provide context and all those are new skills that people are not used to, so you have to train them on that."
This story originally appeared in Travel Weekly.