In this promotional case‑study video, Southwest Airlines executives discuss how the airline’s long‑standing hospitality brand is being modernized through digital channels. They explain that customers now expect natural, frictionless interactions, but legacy phone and chat systems caused pauses and frustration. To address this, Southwest partnered with Salesforce, leveraging its flexible, headless architecture and AI assistant Agentforce. Agentforce handles roughly 20,000 daily interactions, automatically containing about 50 % of queries, and provides real‑time journey awareness that lets agents proactively resolve issues. The platform captures decision context, enabling continuous improvement through observability and scripting. By offloading routine tasks to AI, Southwest reduces friction for both employees and passengers, allowing humans to focus on genuine hospitality.
Chapters
Our brand has always been grounded in hospitality, and I don't think that's changed. We have democratized the skies. And that's always what it's been about at Southwest. It's following the customer's needs. Our customers are starting to expect these more natural interactions with our brand through digital surfaces. It was not easy to find that information and serve our customers effectively. And so it created pauses, pauses in phone calls, pauses in chats, and that creates frustration.
We realized we had to change the way that we operated to meet their needs. Salesforce has always been able to handle complicated things, and we knew we could turn to Salesforce when we had to make these big changes. It was an easy choice to work with Salesforce.
Kansas City boarding in 15 minutes. Hey, honey, how are you?
We're gonna have a baby.
I know, I'm so excited to be a father.
No, no, like we're gonna have a baby right now.
You need to get here. Okay, babe, I'm gonna change my flight.
Now boarding for Denver at gate 9. Our current usage of our AI assistant has really enabled us to surface the right information to our customers at the right time.
We have 20,000 interactions a day with agent Agentforce, where they really help answer and contain about 50% of the interactions.
And that's actually where Agentforce has shined for us because in an airline, there is a lot to be deterministic about. We can't take chances with our operation or with our customers. When you don't know where somebody sits, you're unable to serve them. If we can recognize that there's been an issue or opportunity, we'll take action. Our ability to know where our customers are in their journey, it lets us be more proactive for their needs. Agentforce script and observability, Make it better every day.
And what we've been able to build with Salesforce captures what decisions were made by the agent and why. And we actually have other agents that are looking at that and then making sure that we build the right context, just like you would with an employee.
Headless will be very valuable because Salesforce has the knowledge to power a variety of experiences It's easier than ever for a company like us to build some of those things that we need.
Oh my God. You're here.
We really want to showcase that heart and that hospitality because it really makes our customer experience so much better.
We are trying to drive friction out of our employee and our customer experiences to enable our employees and our customers to do what they're best at, and that's to be human.
And platforms like Salesforce make it easier To create that experience.
