Southwest Airlines is moving its entire technology infrastructure to the cloud with Amazon Web Services, targeting a fully AI-enabled architecture by 2028. The shift affects how the airline sells seats, runs daily operations, and supports more than 70,000 employees - with direct implications for the 134 million travelers it serves each year.
"Southwest has always evolved our business with a focus on improving performance, efficiency, and reliability-and applying that same mindset to our technology with AWS is a core part of that strategy," said Lauren Woods, Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer at Southwest Airlines. "From Customer experience, to operations, to how we build the systems behind it-all of it is coming together in a way that helps our Teams move faster, make better decisions, and deliver for our Customers."
Cloud-first and AI-enabled by 2028
The airline will transition from a largely on-premises environment to a cloud-based setup on AWS. It plans to use AI and agent-based capabilities across the business, adopting tools like Amazon Q. The partnership places a heavy emphasis on AI Agents & Automation to handle complex tasks and speed up decision-making.
"Southwest Airlines is using AI to deliver on its commitment to being a customer-obsessed airline. By deploying AI agents across customer experience, operations, and software development, they're accelerating innovation for 134 million travelers-and proving that pioneering ambition paired with AWS's agentic AI capabilities delivers real, measurable results at scale," said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Agentic AI at AWS.
Modernizing Southwest.com with Kiro
One of the first major projects involves Southwest.com, the airline's largest customer-facing platform. Southwest is using Kiro, AWS's agentic coding service, to refactor legacy code. More than 2,700 developers now work with Kiro to build features, automate testing, and generate cloud infrastructure. Tasks that once took hours now complete in minutes.
Changing how software gets built
Beyond a single tool, Southwest is transforming its entire software development approach. Using an AI-Driven Development Lifecycle built on AWS, the airline is moving to an agent-driven model where AI agents push development forward, while engineering teams guide, validate, and own the outcomes.
Why this matters for Customer Support
For customer support professionals, the airline's push into agentic AI signals a clear direction. AI agents deployed across customer experience directly affect how support teams handle inquiries, resolve issues, and manage day-to-day interactions. The shift shows a future where support roles partner with AI agents to deliver faster, more consistent service - a real-world application of AI for Customer Support principles. As airlines automate routine tasks, support staff can focus on complex cases, requiring new skills in AI collaboration and oversight.
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