Heathrow’s Hallie – Heathrow says its WhatsApp AI agent Hallie, powered by Salesforce tools, is already shifting traveler questions away from phone calls and is set to expand onto the airport’s website and app later this year.
When 85 million people move through Heathrow in a year, even small questions can become a big operational load—especially when they all land on the same phone lines. Travelers ask how long security might take, which nearby shop sits closest to their gate, and what to do if their bag is left behind.
Heathrow’s answer is an AI agent built to handle those questions instantly.. The airport’s director of digital. e-commerce. and marketing. Peter Burns. said Heathrow has spent the past three years deepening its partnership with Salesforce—starting from a foundation laid in 2009—to make customer service feel faster as passenger demand keeps rising.
Heathrow began deploying Salesforce’s generative and agentic AI capabilities in 2023. and by March 2025 it launched Hallie. an AI customer service agent that lives on WhatsApp.. Burns said Hallie answers nearly all traveler questions without human help. and he pointed to a measurable shift: after finding earlier this year that Hallie significantly reduced the number of customer calls to the airport. Heathrow is now planning to roll the tool out further on its website and app.
The push reflects how customer service itself has become a proving ground for AI.. Gartner Research Vice President Bern Elliot told Business Insider that contact centers can act as “AI incubators” because return-on-investment metrics are clear—time saved. agent call volume. response times. and response quality. among others.. But she also warned that AI in these environments depends on having AI-ready data. because without it. large language models can produce incorrect responses.. “Having AI-ready data is a huge issue,” Elliot said.
At Heathrow, the technical groundwork mattered as much as the chatbot.
Heathrow’s Salesforce-built foundation started with Service Cloud in July 2009, which helps customer service agents manage inquiries across multiple channels.. By July 2021. Heathrow had uploaded customer and marketing data into Salesforce’s real-time data platform. so teams in customer service. marketing. and e-commerce could see live passenger information.
Burns said those early Salesforce investments didn’t include AI capabilities at the time. but they were “critical to creating a unified database” that could later support customer service AI agents.. In January 2023. Heathrow became an early adopter of Salesforce’s generative AI capabilities. starting with two internal use cases: autonomously drafting replies to customer inquiries and creating case wrapups—summaries that customer service agents prepare after helping someone.. Those tests fed more information back into Heathrow’s database as the airport refined the quality of AI-drafted responses.
By late 2023. Salesforce’s Agentforce—its autonomous AI platform built to complete customer service. sales. and marketing tasks—was deployed in Heathrow’s contact center to assist human agents with two tasks: writing responses to customer questions and generating a summary after a case was resolved.. Burns said the goal was to reduce the need for agents to type every response and case summary from scratch.
Heathrow also worked closely with Salesforce’s senior vice president of solution engineering. Paul O’Sullivan. and his UK-based engineering team to test and improve AI capabilities before Hallie’s launch.. O’Sullivan said executive leadership. product managers. engineers. and representatives from security. data. and cloud teams need to stay aligned. because internal databases can become outdated and make tools less useful.. “The reality is these agents need to be exactly like you and I. and how we work. because we’re constantly learning. ” he said.
Heathrow built Hallie from what it knows internally. On WhatsApp, Burns said Hallie draws from a database of 500 articles that outline processes. Still, he said some policies took months to gather, update, and implement.
As the system matured, Heathrow expanded what it fed into Salesforce.. In July 2024, the airport added more of its internal data to Salesforce’s data platform, enabling real-time flight-tracking information.. Heathrow’s unified data foundation—bringing together customer data. airport maps. flight statuses. and advances in generative AI—then supported the March 2025 launch of Hallie.
Burns said travelers using Hallie can ask about upcoming flights, how to find specific airport amenities and terminals, and the length of the security line.
The results are prompting expansion, but Hallie still has boundaries.
Before Hallie went live, Burns said 70% of customer inquiries were handled by phone.. He said that by March 2026. phone calls are expected to account for 10% of traveler inquiries as the agent’s agentic capabilities take more of the volume.. Later this year, Hallie will move beyond WhatsApp so customers can access it on Heathrow’s website and app.. Burns also said the airport is considering additional rollouts at kiosks across terminals.
Even so, Hallie is constrained by design.. Burns said it only scrapes data from Heathrow’s website and its internal database.. “We aren’t letting the agent go out into the open web and pull out other information,” he said.. That limitation, he added, affects the kinds of questions it can answer.. For example, Hallie cannot yet handle personalized queries like, “Where can I pick up my checked bags?”
Heathrow is keeping a tight focus on accuracy as it grows.. Burns said it’s important for Hallie to provide correct responses. and that external sources can be inaccurate or out of date.. Looking ahead. Heathrow plans to add more functionality to Hallie so passengers can use the tool on platforms beyond WhatsApp. with expansion framed around both reach and reliability.
Heathrow Salesforce Hallie AI customer service WhatsApp contact center Agentforce generative AI air travel