How Virgin Atlantic uses AI to enhance every step of travel
TL;DR
Virgin Atlantic leverages AI, including ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex, to enhance travel experiences by boosting productivity, improving customer service, and maintaining brand authenticity. The airline focuses on a culture of innovation with education, community, and governance to drive ROI and strategic growth.
Key Takeaways
- •Virgin Atlantic uses AI to gain a competitive edge, with tools like ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex improving software development, HR support, and finance insights, leading to faster processes and better customer experiences.
- •The airline fosters AI adoption through a culture built on education, community (via AI champions), guardrails for safety, and continuous iteration, empowering teams to innovate responsibly.
- •AI solutions, such as the digital concierge, are designed to reflect Virgin Atlantic's brand voice, handling routine queries efficiently while seamlessly handing off complex issues to human agents for a personalized touch.
- •ROI is measured on two levels: short-term productivity gains (e.g., time savings) and long-term strategic impact (e.g., reduced wait times, revenue growth), with a focus on outcomes over technology.
- •Advice for leaders includes being ambitious with a three-year vision, starting with business outcomes, and balancing innovation with governance to manage risks and unlock opportunities.
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Virgin Atlantic is a global airline known for delivering memorable travel experiences and connecting millions of people around the world.
We spoke with Oliver Byers, Chief Financial Officer at Virgin Atlantic, about how the airline is approaching AI investments and ROI, supporting safe and responsible adoption in a regulated industry, creating customer experiences that stay true to the brand, and balancing big ambitions with thoughtful governance.
Our Executive Function series features perspectives from leaders driving transformation through AI.
CFOs often have a high bar to pass to support investing in new technologies. As CFO, what convinced you that AI was worth prioritizing across the business initially and at a larger scale?
At Virgin Atlantic, we’ve always seen ourselves as a challenger—willing to take bold bets that help us stand apart. AI fits that philosophy perfectly. Being a smaller airline compared to our global competitors means we need to find smart ways to offset scale disadvantages. Leading-edge technology gives us that edge.
When we started exploring enterprise AI a few years ago, we took a broad approach—testing, learning, and seeing where the real value lay. Over time, we narrowed our partnerships and went deep with a few select leaders, including OpenAI. The conviction came quickly: we could see tangible benefits day to day, from early pilots to our ChatGPT Enterprise trials.
“We can see the benefit that it brings day to day…from small-scale trials that we ran all the way through to larger-scale programs that we’re now running—it’s delivering tangible benefit. From any CFO’s perspective you can’t ignore it—you’ve got to embrace it.”
Once you see the returns—from faster processes to happier people—you can’t ignore it. As a CFO, that makes the investment decision easy.
Internally, your teams are already seeing major productivity gains from using Codex and ChatGPT Enterprise across a range of functions and use cases. What are some of your favorite examples of AI adoption across the business?
The clearest wins came from our digital and software development teams. Using AI, we’re writing and testing code faster, shipping features more quickly, and improving customer experience at speed. In aviation, that’s a huge differentiator—whether it’s our mobile app, check-in experience, or loyalty program. Cycle times are shorter, and customers feel that progress.
Our people teams have also leaned in. We’ve supported custom GPTs on our HR and company policies, which now power faster self-service and internal support. On the finance side, AI helps us build first-pass narratives, analyze performance data, and generate insights in real time which is especially valuable in a regulated industry like ours.
What excites me most is how these smaller wins add up. Each one improves productivity, but collectively they’re reshaping how we operate.
“We’ve seen massive adoption of the technology...ultimately what that results in is us getting more code written at a faster pace in front of our customers to give a better experience.”
Virgin Atlantic has always been a forward-thinking brand focused on people. How do you equip your team members to get the most out of your AI investments?
Culture comes first. Shai (our CEO) and I talk about AI constantly with our teams. We want to create a mindset that sees AI as an opportunity, a tool that empowers our teams, makes us faster and smarter, and helps us deliver brilliantly different experiences for our customers.
We’ve built this culture through four pillars: education, community, guardrails, and iteration.
Training and education came first. Together with OpenAI, we’ve created guides and playbooks—from how to write good prompts to how to build custom GPTs. We now have hundreds of custom GPTs across the organization, and that number grows every week.
We’ve built a network of AI champions—colleagues who love experimenting and share what they learn across teams. They show others the art of the possible. We’ve also partnered with Cambridge Spark to bring in AI apprentices who help us scale and accelerate our efforts.
Then come the guardrails—a trusting approach that protects sensitive areas but still encourages experimentation. Finally, we continuously iterate: what works, what doesn’t, how we can improve. It’s a living framework that evolves as our people and the technology evolve.
Virgin Atlantic’s new digital concierge shows how AI can reimagine brand experiences in a way that feels distinctly human and on-brand. How do you think about designing AI solutions that enhance the brand experience and build business value?
The digital concierge is one of the most exciting things we’ve built. The vision is for every customer to have one place they can go—to get inspiration for travel, manage their booking, resolve queries, or explore loyalty benefits—whether they’re flying Virgin Atlantic or booking a holiday.
But it starts with our brand. Virgin Atlantic has always been about human warmth and wit. Our challenge was: how do we bring that to life through AI? We built the concierge to reflect our brand voice and customer service tone so it truly feels like “us.”
Equally important is knowing when AI shouldn’t act alone. The concierge handles routine queries fast—but when a situation is complex or sensitive, it seamlessly hands off to a person. We’re measuring engagement, satisfaction, and revenue impact, but the heart of it is how naturally and authentically the experience feels.
“It’s not thinking about what’s possible in the next six months—it’s about the vision of what we can do in three years or longer.”
What frameworks or measures do you use to judge whether AI is delivering ROI—both in the short term and as a longer-term strategic bet?
We measure ROI on two levels: short-term productivity gains and long-term strategic impact.
For smaller use cases, we track time savings and productivity gains from the ground up. For larger programs, we start with the outcome—what change are we driving—and build metrics from there.
In a smaller use case—say, marketing teams using AI to create content—we track the number of assets, time to produce them, and overall time saved. For enterprise-scale initiatives like our concierge, we tie metrics directly to outcomes: reductions in customer center wait times, improved self-service rates, and revenue growth.
Do you have any advice for other CFOs and business leaders to ensure they see successful AI adoption across the business?
First, be ambitious. This technology evolves at incredible speed, so think on a three-year horizon and be bold about what you want to achieve.
Second, start with outcomes, not technology. Too many organizations lead with the tools instead of the business problem. Define what success looks like, and build from there
Finally, balance ambition with governance. As CFOs, our role is to manage risk—but also to unlock opportunity. We’ve built clear policies around data privacy, model usage, and access control so our people can innovate confidently. Get those foundations right, and you’ll see the value multiply.
Virgin Atlantic uses ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex across its operations, and leverages OpenAI’s realtime voice API for its voice-powered digital travel concierge.