BA boss fears AI agents could make brands invisible • The Register

British Airways’ chief government has warned that the airline trade is quick heading for a future the place AI brokers, not people, resolve which manufacturers get booked – and carriers that fail to adapt are susceptible to quietly disappearing from the digital store window.

Talking at Globant’s Converge 2025 occasion in London this week, BA boss Sean Doyle painted an image of an airline enterprise colliding head-on with agentic AI, as automated techniques start mediating the whole lot from journey searches to complaints dealing with. The times when a good web site and a distinguished Google outcome have been sufficient to remain seen are “diminishing rapidly,” he mentioned, with bots and AI brokers now poised to take a seat between clients and the manufacturers competing for his or her cash.

That shift poses an existential branding problem for airways, lodges, and different journey companies whose merchandise are chosen much less by individuals shopping and extra by machines optimizing outcomes on their behalf, based on Doyle. If AI brokers develop into the default gatekeepers, the query for BA is not simply the best way to attraction to clients, however how to make sure the airline stays legible, related, and trusted by software program performing of their stead.

The warning comes because the airline trade continues its uneven post-pandemic restoration. Whereas enterprise journey has but to totally bounce again, Doyle mentioned demand has been greater than offset by a surge in leisure journey, pushed by what he described as a pent-up need to maneuver as soon as lockdowns ended. That rebound, he argued, has given airways respiratory room to rethink how they function – and the way a lot of their future is determined by software program reasonably than bums on seats.

Doyle mentioned BA is in the midst of a long-overdue digital overhaul, candidly admitting that the airline would ideally have modernized its platforms years earlier.

“It is honest to say that we’re in all probability behind the curve,” he mentioned, including that the rebuild gives a “leapfrog alternative” reasonably than a easy catch-up train. The brand new digital basis, he argued, ought to permit BA to launch merchandise quicker and reply extra flexibly to altering buyer expectations.

Hyper-personalization was a recurring theme within the speak. Doyle claimed a single BA buyer can generate dozens of knowledge factors as they transfer by means of the airline’s techniques, from reserving to boarding. Till lately, a lot of that data sat in silos, however now the airline is restructuring its information to deploy it extra successfully throughout buyer experiences, together with the way it handles disruptions when flights inevitably go sideways.

The larger prize, although, could also be behind the scenes. Doyle argued that agentic AI gives airways a technique to tear up labor-intensive, legacy processes which have gathered over many years. “There’s plenty of process-intensive methods we run the airline at the moment utilizing outdated expertise that we will merely revolutionize,” he mentioned. Moderately than changing employees outright, he framed automation as a technique to redeploy individuals towards higher-value work. 

“It offers us the chance to repurpose our individuals to essentially do what they love doing, which is interacting with clients and coping with their issues in a really intimate means,” he mentioned.

British Airways has taken a intentionally retro method to enterprise AI, rolling out Copilot licenses to round 5,000 workers reasonably than betting on any single massive language mannequin. Doyle performed down the arms race over whose AI is smartest, arguing the more durable drawback is determining the place the expertise truly delivers measurable impression, reasonably than devolving into what he referred to as an costly “sports activities board” of disconnected experiments.

Trying forward, Doyle mentioned that the airline expects to rely more and more on companions and vendor platforms to assist curate its digital presence, particularly as AI brokers develop into the first interface between vacationers and journey manufacturers. For a enterprise constructed on plane, airports, and climate, the irony is tough to overlook: British Airways’ future visibility could rely much less on what occurs within the skies and extra on how nicely it may possibly clarify itself to machines on the bottom. ®