Every day, millions of passengers take to the skies, and commercial flight numbers continue to climb for the likes of Finnair. After a sharp decline during the pandemic, the aviation industry is firmly in recovery mode — and the upward trend is expected to continue.
According to a European Commission report, commercial flights in the EU rose by 5.8% in 2024 compared to the previous year. Projections for 2025 anticipate a further 3.7% increase, with traffic expected to return to pre-pandemic levels.
For airlines, this growth means more customers — and more data — generated every day. In a world where speed and convenience are paramount, the challenge is clear: how can airlines harness this wealth of information to enhance the customer experience without slowing down operations?
Finnair – Finland’s flagship airline – has flown for over a century. With a 90% on-time rate, it connects 12 million passengers a year to 1,000 destinations via Oneworld – a global airline alliance that brings together several major airlines to provide coordinated services and benefits to travellers, especially frequent flyers.
Innovation is at the core of the Helsinki-based carrier – which was the first to operate nonstop flights from Europe to both Japan and China. This forward-thinking mindset extends to its customer relations team, which has been undergoing a digital transformation for over a decade.
“For around 10 years, we’ve been developing customer-facing touchpoints and digital channels — and our customers appreciate them,” says Tiina Vesterinen, Finnair’s VP of Digital Customer and Revenue.
“We completed a cloud migration during the pandemic period and continue to modernise the airline’s back-end systems. In many ways, we’re leading the industry’s broader digital transformation.”
This drive is part of Finnair’s ambition to “act bigger than our size,” as Vesterinen puts it — leveraging innovation to punch above its weight in a highly competitive market.
Clouds and beyond
Key to Finnair’s digital transformation has been its partnership with Salesforce. The airline first began its Salesforce implementation in 2018, deploying Service Cloud for customer calls.
This was followed by the adoption of Data Cloud to power Finnair Plus loyalty programme emails. Since then, the airline has continued to expand its Salesforce footprint, adding automation, leveraging ‘Einstein for Service’ for tasks like baggage management and refunds, and integrating further customer data sources.
But the advent of AI has seen Finnair take the next step, becoming one of the first airlines to adopt Agentforce, the vendor’s agentic AI offering.
Salesforce launched Agentforce at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco last year, and since then, its AI agents have handled more than one million customer conversations on its own platform, help.salesforce.com. According to the vendor, Agentforce on Salesforce’s help site now resolves about 85% of support requests.
“Once we have a platform in place, our philosophy is to maximise its potential rather than bringing in new vendors,” Vesterinen says. “It made sense to extend our Salesforce use for AI, given the foundations we already had.”
Drawing data from Finnair’s website, Service Cloud insights, loyalty data in Data Cloud and booking information from the Amadeus reservation system, Agentforce has started answering customer queries faster and more accurately.
“It has been a natural evolution,” adds Vesterinen. “Once we had the foundations in place, we are gradually adding automation and case handling and disruption handling and different types of messaging with the customers. Then we want that to integrate seamlessly with our other platforms.”
Customer satisfaction, she adds, is “at the centre of everything we do” but in the aerospace sector, disruption is inevitable.
If there is a weather incident, for example, then customer contacts are “very high”. At times like this, Finnair sees the benefit of having a scalable digital workforce that can help manage situations.
“We try to automate as much as possible,” she adds. “That really supports our human workforce, who the AI agents will hand over to when necessary.”
Agentic people power
Currently, Finnair is using Agentforce on its website, which is the biggest web shop in Finland, as part of its direct customer interface. It operates a chat function, speaking directly to customers, answering generic questions, and dealing with basic queries about everything from loyalty schemes to upcoming trips and baggage allowances.
“It has only been a short period of time,” says Vesterinen, “but so far it has been working well. First contact resolution has been higher and customer satisfaction has also been on a good level as well.”
Vesterinen says through Agentforce, Finnair is seeing up to 80% resolution. The upgrade is also helping the airline with training new human agents, reducing onboarding times by up to 30%.
Staff, she adds, have also embraced their new agentic colleagues. By having the AI agents triage customer queries, human agents are more equipped to deal with the more difficult questions.
“We involve the teams early on,” explains Vesterinen. “It means our agents don’t have to spend as much time digging various systems for data and putting it together when tackling queries.
“This makes their job easier and allows them to focus on those situations where they are needed the most. It is important to keep that human element by having them work with the AI.”
Additionally, Finnair uses Salesforce’s AI to summarise closed cases, offering clearer insights into customer needs and discussion trends.
Sticking the landing
Currently, Agentforce can’t answer travel-specific queries that require live reservation data, like alternative routing during disruption. Integrating Agentforce with its Enterprise Resource Planning system Amadeus – where flight inventory resides – is the next step.
“That will be very powerful, allowing us to proactively answer travel-related questions,” Vesterinen explains. “We’re collaborating with Salesforce and Amadeus on this, and it’s an advancement that could benefit the entire airline industry.”
Finnair also sees value in consolidating additional data sources to form a unified view of the customer journey across web, mobile, email and in-person touchpoints. But Vesterinen is clear that data privacy and customer consent remain central to the strategy.
“We should always be very careful about the use of the data and the consents that we have from the customer,” she says. “We take those very seriously, so when we explore the possibilities, we always see, that’s not possible, the customer has not given consent.”
Next up is pulling more data into the system, Vesterinen tells TechInformed, including reservation data, which could open even more use cases for Agentforce.
“Adding more data sources and giving customers more power to make changes to things like reservations at times of disruption, are the next things we are looking at,” she explains. “That would open new possibilities and offer real value for our customers.
“Once we have the loyalty, the reservation, the behavioural data there, we can service [customers] better with the tools and be more proactive.”
She is measuring success, she adds, through the value that has lifted Finnair for more than a century: Customer satisfaction. “Innovation is part of our heritage,” she concludes. “We’ve always wanted to be leading the development initiatives in the industry.
“But customers will always be at the centre of everything we do as an airline.”
