Heathrow: where AI enters airport operations

Heathrow is one of the UK airports with facial-recognition eGates, according to GOV.UK and CN Traveler, which reported it on 20 May 2026.

From 6 October 2026 the Home Office began switching eGates to contactless mode, starting at East Midlands Airport with British citizens. Every eGate was due to be upgraded by early 2027, and no date had been given for Heathrow, the Home Office said on 6 October 2026.

Heathrow has selected AIRHART, the platform of Smarter Airports, as the new base for its core operational systems. Netcompany announced the selection on 24 February 2026 and will support implementation. Heathrow Chief Operating Officer Javier Echave is quoted backing the programme, which Netcompany describes as a multi-year agreement.

Netcompany lists three capabilities in scope. A next-generation airport operational database, or AODB, the central record of flight and resource data that other airport systems read from, will replace Heathrow's existing systems. Alongside it come Airport Collaborative Decision Making, the A-CDM process through which the airport, airlines, ground handlers and air traffic control share turnaround milestones, and an Airport Operations Plan that Netcompany calls predictive and continuously optimised.

On AI, the published material stays general. Netcompany refers to "AI-driven decision support" and Future Travel Experience, in March 2026, to "predictive AI" for orchestrating operations, but neither names the models, the data they would be trained on or where their output would reach Heathrow staff. FTE reports that Heathrow joins Copenhagen Airport and Munich Airport in adopting this kind of orchestration platform.

Migration from the current systems is the next stage. Heathrow and its suppliers have not given a go-live date or said how the migration will be sequenced, so the record stays at contracted.

Passenger security lanes in all four Heathrow terminals have been replaced with CT scanners, Heathrow announced on 23 January 2026 at the close of a £1bn upgrade. Smiths Detection confirmed on 30 January 2026 that the scanner is its HI-SCAN 6040 CTiX. Heathrow calls itself the largest airport in the world to fully roll out next-generation CT security scanners, and Smiths makes the same claim.

Computed tomography builds a three-dimensional image of each bag instead of the flat views produced by conventional X-ray, and Smiths pairs that volumetric image with automatic threat recognition software intended to reduce manual bag checks. Smiths says the scanners meet ECAC's C3 standard, which it describes as the highest performance standard for explosives detection systems for cabin baggage. For passengers, Heathrow says liquids and electronics can stay in hand luggage, and Smiths specifies liquids of up to 2 litres.

Heathrow chose the equipment in March 2021. Smiths' announcement of that selection also covered iLane automatic tray-return systems, its Checkpoint.Evo plus lane-management software and a ten-year equipment service agreement.

With every terminal converted, the open questions concern performance. Lane throughput and alarm rates for the new lanes have not been published by either company.

Heathrow's finance, HR, supply chain and asset management functions run on Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, and the airport has added Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence on top of the ERP and HCM data they hold. Fusion Cloud went live in January 2022, Capgemini announced on 24 January 2022, in a programme Oracle's blog calls Project Magenta. Oracle's press release of May 2026 says Heathrow uses the analytics layer for governed access to sensitive data and embedded AI and machine-learning features.

Procurement gives the most concrete example. According to an Oracle Analytics blog of September 2025, Heathrow used OCI Document Understanding, Oracle's document-extraction service, to code invoices automatically, so that dashboards could flag errors and discrepancies that staff had previously chased by hand, such as invoices that did not match ERP transactions or carried wrong VAT numbers. The same blog describes HR predictive analytics run over a decade of workforce records, with salary history, leave of absence and department transfers emerging as indicators of staff likely to leave.

Oracle sets the work against Heathrow's size: almost 85 million passengers last year, over 90,000 people employed on site and more than £200 billion a year in trade, by its May 2026 figures. Its September 2025 blog gives more than 83 million passengers and £200 billion of trade in 2024. These are Oracle's numbers, not measures of what the software has achieved.

Alan Petrie, who now leads corporate data and analytics at Heathrow, told Oracle in 2025 that early pilots of Oracle's AI assistant for FDI pointed towards staff querying data in plain language. In a second Oracle Analytics blog interview, published on 13 October 2026, he says AI agents are "being embedded in many business processes" in Fusion Applications, answering staff questions such as how many days' leave they have left or what Heathrow's maternity policy is. Most of the rest of that interview sets out plans, not systems already in use.

The same post says Petrie's team recently won the EMEA Oracle Excellence Award for Data Analytics and AI; both the award and the announcement are Oracle's. No independent assessment of finance or HR outcomes has been published. Because FDI inherits the Fusion security model, it also sets the access rules for finance and HR data that other AI work at the airport would draw on. This is Aerostack's interpretation; Heathrow has not said so.

Inside British Airways' Integrated Operations Centre at Heathrow, controllers work from Emu Analytics' Flo.w software, known internally as Mission Control. Emu says it merges real-time aircraft movement data with BA's AODB, ADS-B feeds, ground-vehicle telematics and crew systems into one view of the airside operation. Richard Anderson, BA's director of global operations, told Future Travel Experience in May 2025 that it tracks every aircraft movement by the second, which BA uses to find delay hotspots and to plan tows between its engineering base at the east end of the airport and its customer operation at the west.

The only figure from outside the vendor is OAG's. In June 2025 OAG reported that BA's share of Heathrow flights delayed by at least 60 minutes had fallen from 12% earlier that year to 8%, and linked the improvement to the digital twin and towing work. OAG's post does not say how much of the change it credits to the tool.

Emu's case study, accessed in October 2026, says Mission Control has contributed more than $20 million in annual savings and over 200,000 minutes of delay avoided, across BA's hub and international operation rather than Heathrow alone. It costs four pathways that together come to about $3.94 million a year; the largest, $1.42 million for stand and turnaround work, multiplies roughly 2,800 interventions by four minutes saved, a EUROCONTROL benchmark of $127 per minute and a 50% share credited to Flo.w. Emu also reports a reduction of about 25–30% in tug idle time.

All of the savings figures are Emu's. BA has not published its own, and no next phase has been announced.

BEUMER said on 11 January 2024 that it had the contract for Heathrow's new Terminal 2 baggage system, designed for 31,000 bags a day.

BEUMER said the Terminal 2 upgrade would soon use its Flow Twin digital twin, Airport World reported on 22 April 2025. Heathrow said on 19 December 2025 that construction would start in 2026.

Passengers who message Heathrow on WhatsApp reach Hallie, an AI agent built on Salesforce Agentforce. Peter Burns, Heathrow's director of digital, e-commerce and marketing, told Business Insider in May 2026 that it launched in March 2025. It answers questions on flights, gate directions, amenities and security queue lengths from Heathrow's Service Cloud knowledge base and live data, and Burns said it does not search the open web.

Salesforce's June 2025 release reports a 90% chat resolution rate without transfer to a human agent and more than 50% fewer chat exchanges to reach an answer. It also reports a 40% improvement in digital contact efficiency, while saying in the same release that Heathrow "expects to improve" that efficiency by up to 40%, so the figure is Salesforce-reported and partly forward-looking. Burns told Business Insider that phone calls fell from 70% of customer enquiries before Hallie to 10% by March 2026.

The two sources disagree on the size of the knowledge base behind the agent. Salesforce cites 800 knowledge articles; Business Insider reports a database of about 500. Aerostack publishes both rather than choosing one.

Burns said Hallie would reach Heathrow's website and app later in 2026, and that kiosks in the terminals are being considered, with no plan announced. No independent measure of answer accuracy or passenger satisfaction has been published.

BigBear.ai announced on 2 August 2024 that it had signed a master service agreement with Heathrow "to develop and deliver advanced technologies" at the airport. The company had referred to the agreement a day earlier in exhibits to an 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated 1 August 2024.

A master service agreement sets terms for future pieces of work; it does not by itself commit either side to a project. BigBear.ai's release says this one "allows for a wide range of potential projects" aimed at security, operational effectiveness and the traveller experience, and points to its Vision AI portfolio, including image-based anomaly and threat detection, alongside advanced analytics and digital twin capabilities.

No project, site or go-live under the agreement had been announced by BigBear.ai or Heathrow as of 15 October 2026, and neither has published a timetable for one. All descriptions of scope come from BigBear.ai.

Under Heathrow's Here to Help programme, staff from non-operational roles spend time in the terminals answering passenger questions. In a blog post of 31 May 2024, Microsoft described as live a custom assistant built for them in Copilot Studio, its low-code tool for building chat assistants on sources an organisation chooses. It runs inside Microsoft Teams and draws its answers from Heathrow's public website, internal FAQ documents and bus timetables.

The users are occasional. Microsoft says Here to Help colleagues "may only work in the terminals 4 or 5 times a year", and presents the assistant as a replacement for manual searches and calls to other colleagues.

Two and a half years on, that blog remains the only public source. Nothing published since confirms the assistant is still in use. Heathrow and Microsoft have released no figures on answer accuracy or staff uptake.

Heathrow forecasts passenger flow through the airport on the Databricks Data + AI Platform, running on Microsoft Azure. Databricks announced the work in September 2024 and said the airport relies on over 26TB of data covering passenger numbers, flights, airlines, seasonal performance, traffic and weather.

Within a year of the move, Databricks said, the time to produce forecast insight fell from two weeks to four hours and the margin of error from 30% to 10%. Its customer page adds that the job once needed two people and now needs one. The same page says Heathrow treats a security queue longer than five minutes as a breach of customer experience, and uses the forecasts to schedule predictive maintenance, cleaning and service interruptions into quieter periods.

Heathrow records its trained models in MLflow, the open-source tool for tracking models and promoting them from development to production, and in 2024 was looking at Delta Sharing to pass data to airlines, ground handlers and other Heathrow companies. Databricks has not described the forecasting method itself.

Every figure here is Databricks' own, published in September 2024 with named Heathrow staff, and none has been measured independently. There has been no public update on the forecasting work since then.

Heathrow's security planning team had moved from spreadsheets to Azure Machine Learning to forecast how many passengers will reach security at each terminal in 15-minute intervals, Business Insider reported in May 2019. Those forecasts feed the rosters that set how many security lanes are open.

Stuart Birrell, Heathrow's chief information officer at the time, told Business Insider that the predictions go to 20,000 staff across 400 companies at the airport, and that they help UK Border Force staff immigration. The stack described in that interview combines SQL Azure storage, Azure Stream Analytics for real-time event processing, Azure Data Lake Analytics and Power BI dashboards.

Microsoft's UK Stories site carries an earlier account from Birrell, first published in October 2018 and last updated in April 2024. In it he says Heathrow focuses its data on Azure and Power BI for planning, scheduling and communication with Border Force, and puts the airport's direct workforce at around 7,000 and the number of people working across the airport each day at 76,000.

The newest first-hand source for this record is Business Insider's interview of May 2019. Neither source publishes forecast accuracy or queue outcomes, and no Heathrow statement from 2025 or 2026 confirms the system is still in use, so the record is marked unverified.