Heathrow and Salesforce: AI Hallie Transforms Customer Service

Heathrow and Salesforce: A Strategic Collaboration

Heathrow Airport, the busiest in the UK, has recently introduced an AI assistant named Hallie to enhance its customer service. Developed in collaboration with Salesforce, Hallie is currently accessible via WhatsApp and is expected to be integrated into the airport's website and app by the end of the year.

In 2025, nearly 85 million travelers passed through Heathrow, generating a multitude of questions ranging from wait times to security to the locations of amenities. To address this growing demand, Peter Burns, Heathrow's Chief Digital Officer, emphasized the need for an advanced technological solution.

Burns explained that the goal was to improve customer service at Europe's largest airport, where demand continues to rise. "As we increase our capacity, we need to find a technological solution," he stated. Heathrow has therefore spent the last three years strengthening its partnership with Salesforce, which began in 2009. The airport started implementing Salesforce's generative AI products and agents in 2023, focusing particularly on customer service applications. These initial tests led to the launch of Hallie, the airport's customer service AI agent, which operates on WhatsApp and answers nearly all traveler questions without human assistance, in March 2025, according to Burns.

Since discovering earlier this year that Hallie significantly reduced the number of customer calls to the airport, Heathrow is looking to further deploy the tool on its website and app. Customer service has been a popular use case for generative AI across various sectors since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, said Bern Elliot, Vice President at Gartner Research. Elliot explained that a company's customer contact centers can act as incubators for AI, as their return on investment metrics—time saved, agent call volume, response time, and quality of responses, among others—are clearly defined.

"You don't need to connect a lot of dots to go from what you've deployed to what is measurable improvement," Elliot said. "This provides an excellent starting point in your AI journey." However, integrating AI into customer service systems is not a straightforward process, Elliot added. AI systems must be trained on a company's most recent data; otherwise, large language models are more likely to provide incorrect answers. "Having AI-ready data is a huge issue," Elliot stated.

Burns—along with Paul O'Sullivan, Senior Vice President of Solution Engineering at Salesforce—discussed with Business Insider how Heathrow and Salesforce collaborated to navigate these data complexities and launch Hallie.

The Technology Behind Hallie

Although Heathrow's initial investments in Salesforce lacked AI capabilities, Burns stated they were essential for creating a unified database that would later serve as the foundation for the airport's customer service AI agents. Heathrow's relationship with Salesforce began in July 2009 when it deployed Salesforce Service Cloud, a platform that helps customer service agents manage requests across multiple channels. By July 2021, Heathrow's customer and marketing data had been uploaded to Salesforce's real-time data platform, providing airport employees in customer service, marketing, and e-commerce with live views of passenger data.

Burns noted that Heathrow became a pioneer of Salesforce's generative AI capabilities in 2023, largely due to the airport's existing use of Salesforce products. The deployment of AI began in January with two internal use cases: autonomously drafting responses to customer inquiries and creating case summaries, the summaries that customer service agents prepare after assisting someone. These two tests fed further information into Heathrow's database, helping to continuously refine the quality of AI-generated responses, Burns stated.

By the end of 2023, Salesforce's Agentforce—the company's autonomous AI platform that can automatically perform customer service, sales, and marketing tasks—was deployed in the airport's contact center to assist human agents with two specific tasks: drafting responses to customer questions and generating a summary after a case is resolved. Previously, agents had to type each response and case summary, Burns clarified.

He added that Heathrow worked closely with O'Sullivan and his team of engineers based in the UK to test and improve the airport's AI capabilities before launching Hallie. Salesforce has regularly met with the Heathrow team since the beginning of their partnership in 2009, with in-person visits about once a quarter and regular virtual updates every two weeks, O'Sullivan stated. In recent years, their meetings have focused on observing contact agent workflows and identifying pain points where AI could be applied.

O'Sullivan told Business Insider that it is essential for management, product leaders, engineers, and representatives from security, data, and cloud teams to be on the same page before deploying tools like Agentforce, as internal databases could be outdated and render the technology less useful. "The reality is that these agents need to be just like you and me, and how we work, because we are constantly learning," he said.

At Heathrow, Agentforce relies on the airport's database containing 500 articles describing processes. However, some policies took several months to gather, update, and implement, Burns told Business Insider. By July 2024, Heathrow added more of its internal data to Salesforce's data platform, enabling the airport to provide customers with real-time flight tracking data.

Heathrow's unified data foundation, which brought together customer data, airport maps, flight statuses, and advancements in generative AI, led to the launch of the AI agent Hallie in March 2025. On WhatsApp, travelers can ask Hallie questions about upcoming flights, how to find specific airport amenities and terminals, and the length of the security line.

The Outcome and Future Prospects

Before the launch of Hallie, 70% of customer inquiries were handled by phone, Burns stated. With Hallie's agent capabilities, by March 2026, phone calls accounted for 10% of traveler inquiries. Later this year, Hallie will expand beyond WhatsApp so that customers can access the tool on Heathrow's website and app, Burns added. The airport is also considering future deployments for Hallie, such as in kiosks throughout its terminals.

However, Hallie's safeguards are limited: it only retrieves data from Heathrow's website and internal database, Burns stated. "We do not allow the agent to go on the open web and extract other information," he said. This decision somewhat limits the AI agent's outputs, as it cannot yet handle personalized questions such as, "Where can I pick up my checked luggage?"

Burns emphasized the importance of Hallie providing accurate answers and added that external sources could contain inaccurate or outdated information. In the future, Heathrow plans to add more features to Hallie so that passengers can use the tool on platforms beyond WhatsApp, Burns stated.