British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted
CEO warns airlines that don’t learn to sell themselves to machines could soon be flying under the radar
British Airways' chief executive has warned that the airline industry is fast heading for a future where AI agents, not humans, decide which brands get booked – and carriers that fail to adapt are at risk of quietly disappearing from the digital shop window.
Speaking at Globant's Converge 2025 event in London this week, BA boss Sean Doyle painted a picture of an airline business colliding head-on with agentic AI, as automated systems begin mediating everything from travel searches to complaints handling. The days when a decent website and a prominent Google result were enough to stay visible are "diminishing quickly," he said, with bots and AI agents now poised to sit between customers and the brands competing for their money.
That shift poses an existential branding challenge for airlines, hotels, and other travel firms whose products are selected less by people browsing and more by machines optimizing outcomes on their behalf, according to Doyle. If AI agents become the default gatekeepers, the question for BA is no longer just how to appeal to customers, but how to ensure the airline remains legible, relevant, and trusted by software acting in their stead.
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The warning comes as the airline industry continues its uneven post-pandemic recovery. While business travel has yet to fully bounce back, Doyle said demand has been more than offset by a surge in leisure travel, driven by what he described as a pent-up desire to move once lockdowns ended. That rebound, he argued, has given airlines breathing room to rethink how they operate – and how much of their future depends on software rather than bums on seats.
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Doyle said BA is in the middle of a long-overdue digital overhaul, candidly admitting that the airline would ideally have modernized its platforms years earlier.
"It's fair to say that we're probably behind the curve," he said, adding that the rebuild offers a "leapfrog opportunity" rather than a simple catch-up exercise. The new digital foundation, he argued, should allow BA to release products faster and respond more flexibly to changing customer expectations.
Hyper-personalization was a recurring theme in the talk. Doyle claimed a single BA customer can generate dozens of data points as they move through the airline's systems, from booking to boarding. Until recently, much of that information sat in silos, but now the airline is restructuring its data to deploy it more effectively across customer experiences, including how it handles disruptions when flights inevitably go sideways.
The bigger prize, though, may be behind the scenes. Doyle argued that agentic AI offers airlines a way to tear up labor-intensive, legacy processes that have accumulated over decades. "There's a lot of process-intensive ways we run the airline today using old technology that we can simply revolutionize," he said. Rather than replacing staff outright, he framed automation as a way to redeploy people toward higher-value work.
"It gives us the opportunity to repurpose our people to really do what they love doing, which is interacting with customers and dealing with their problems in a very intimate way," he said.
British Airways has taken a deliberately unfashionable approach to enterprise AI, rolling out Copilot licenses to around 5,000 employees rather than betting on any single large language model. Doyle played down the arms race over whose AI is smartest, arguing the harder problem is figuring out where the technology actually delivers measurable impact, rather than devolving into what he called an expensive "smorgasbord" of disconnected experiments.
Looking ahead, Doyle said that the airline expects to rely increasingly on partners and vendor platforms to help curate its digital presence, especially as AI agents become the primary interface between travelers and travel brands. For a business built on aircraft, airports, and weather, the irony is hard to miss: British Airways' future visibility may depend less on what happens in the skies and more on how well it can explain itself to machines on the ground. ®