In 2025, nearly 85 million travelers used Heathrow Airport. In the midst of all the commotion, they had many questions. “How long does it take to get through security?” Which Starbucks is closest to my departure gate? If my bag is left behind at security, how do I find it?
Peter Burns, Heathrow’s director of digital, e-commerce and marketing, told Business Insider that the company wants to improve customer service at Europe’s busiest airport as demand continues to grow. “As we expand our production capacity, we have to find technological solutions,” he said. To that end, Burns said Heathrow had spent the past three years deepening its long-standing partnership with Salesforce, which began in 2009.
Heathrow Airport was the first to deploy Salesforce’s generative and agentic AI products in 2023, with a focus on customer service applications. These initial tests led to the March 2025 launch of Hallie, the airport’s customer service AI agent that resides on WhatsApp and answers almost all travelers’ questions without human assistance, Burns said. After discovering earlier this year that Hallie significantly reduced the number of customer calls to the airport, Heathrow Airport is looking to further implement the tool across its website and app.
Gartner Research Vice President Bern Elliot said that since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, customer service has become a popular use case for generative AI across industries. Elliott told Business Insider that a company’s customer contact center can serve as an AI incubator because it has clearly defined return-on-investment metrics, such as time savings, agent call volume, response time, and response quality, among others.
“You don’t have to connect too many dots to derive measurable improvement from what you put in place,” Elliott says. “This is a great starting point for your AI journey.”
But incorporating AI into customer service systems is not a simple process, Elliott says. AI systems need to be trained on the latest data from your company. Otherwise, large language models are likely to return incorrect responses. “Having AI-enabled data is a big problem,” Elliott says.
Burns, along with Paul O’Sullivan, senior vice president of solutions engineering at Salesforce, spoke to Business Insider about how Heathrow Airport and Salesforce worked together to navigate the complexities of these data and launch Hallie.
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Although Heathrow Airport’s initial investment in Salesforce lacked AI capabilities, Burns said they were essential to creating an integrated database that later served as the basis for the airport’s customer service AI agents.
Heathrow Airport’s relationship with Salesforce began in July 2009 when the company introduced Salesforce Service Cloud, a platform that helps customer service agents manage inquiries across multiple channels. By July 2021, Heathrow Airport’s customer and marketing data was uploaded to Salesforce’s real-time data platform, providing airport employees working in customer service, marketing, and e-commerce with a live view of passenger data.
Burns said Heathrow became an early adopter of Salesforce’s generative AI capabilities in 2023, primarily because the airport was already using existing Salesforce products. AI adoption began that January with two internal use cases. One is to autonomously draft a response to a customer inquiry, and the other is to create a case wrap-up (a summary that a customer service agent prepares after helping someone). Burns said these two tests fed more information into Heathrow’s database and helped it continually improve the quality of the answers produced by the AI.
By late 2023, Salesforce’s Agentforce, the software company’s autonomous AI platform that can automatically complete customer service, sales, and marketing tasks, will be deployed in airport contact centers, allowing human agents to assist with two specific tasks. It’s writing answers to customer questions and creating summaries after the case is resolved. Previously, agents had to enter all answers and case summaries, Burns said.
He added that Heathrow had worked closely with Mr O’Sullivan and a team of UK-based engineers to test and improve the airport’s AI capabilities ahead of Harry’s launch. O’Sullivan said Salesforce has met regularly with the Heathrow team since the partnership began in 2009, with in-person visits about once a quarter and regular virtual updates every two weeks. Recent conferences have focused on observing contact agent workflows and identifying pain points where AI can be applied.
O’Sullivan told Business Insider that it’s important to get executives, product managers, engineers, and representatives from security, data, and cloud teams on the same page before implementing a tool like Agentforce, as internal databases can become outdated and the technology’s usefulness diminishes. “The reality is that these agents need to be exactly like you and me, and the way we work needs to be the same, because we’re always learning,” he said.
At Heathrow Airport, Agentforce pulls from the airport database of 500 articles that outline the process. But some policies took months to collect, update and implement, Burns told Business Insider.
In July 2024, Heathrow Airport added more internal data to its Salesforce data platform, enabling the airport to provide customers with real-time flight tracking data.
Heathrow’s unified data foundation, which brings together customer data, airport maps, flight status and advances in generative AI, led to the launch of Heathrow’s AI agent Hallie in March 2025. On WhatsApp, travelers can ask Harry questions about upcoming flights, how to find specific airport amenities and terminals, the length of security lines, and more.
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Before Hallie’s launch, 70% of customer inquiries were handled over the phone, Burns said. Thanks to the bot’s agent capabilities, calls will account for 10% of traveler inquiries by March 2026.
Later this year, Hallie will expand beyond WhatsApp, giving customers access to the tool from Heathrow’s website and app, Burns added. The airport is also considering introducing Harry to kiosks in terminals in the future.
Still, Hallie’s guardrails are limited, Burns said, as it only collects data from Heathrow’s website and internal databases. “We do not allow our agents to expose themselves to the open web and extract other information,” he said. This decision limits the output of the AI agent to some extent. This is because AI agents cannot yet handle personalized questions such as “Where can I pick up my checked baggage?”
Burns said it was important for Harry to provide accurate answers, adding that external sources could contain inaccurate or outdated information. Over time, Burns said Heathrow plans to add further functionality to Harry, allowing passengers to use the tool on platforms other than WhatsApp.