SOUTHWEST AIRLINES PARTNERS WITH AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) | News
Southwest Airlines Co. is partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider of choice to modernize its technology foundation and evolve the way the airline operates, builds and serves its customers. As part of this partnership, Southwest will transition from a largely on-premise environment to a cloud-based, AI and agent-enabled architecture on AWS by 2028, laying the foundation to operate with greater speed, flexibility and reliability to support the business.
Technology powers nearly every part of the airline, from selling seats to running daily operations and supporting more than 70,000 employees. As the airline continues to evolve its business model and customer experience, it is also accelerating efforts to simplify its technology environment and improve the way systems work together at scale.
“Southwest has always developed 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 the customer experience to the business operations and how we build the systems behind it, it all comes together in a way that helps our teams move faster, make better decisions and deliver for our customers.”
Build a cloud-based airline by 2028
Southwest continues to modernize its footprint on AWS, targeting a fully cloud-based environment by 2028, while expanding how the company uses AI and agent-based capabilities across the business by adopting new tools like Amazon Quick.
“Southwest Airlines is using AI to deliver on its promise to be a customer-obsessed airline. By deploying AI agents across customer experience, operations and software development, they are accelerating innovation for 134 million travelers – proving that game-changing ambition combined with AWS’s agentic AI capabilities delivers real, measurable results at scale,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Agentic AI at AWS.
Accelerate modernization with Kiro
Southwest uses Kiro, AWS’s agentic coding service, to modernize one of its largest and most critical customer-facing platforms: Southwest.com.
Historically, the platform has managed a large number of on-premise systems with long modernization timelines. By using Kiro to refactor legacy code, Southwest has significantly accelerated that effort. Kiro is now used by more than 2,700 developers to build features, help automate tests, and generate infrastructure in the cloud.
This work creates a foundation that is easier to develop, scale and support, allowing Southwest to move faster and automate tasks in minutes that previously took hours.
Rethink how software is built with AI-Driven Development Life Cycle
In addition to individual tools, Southwest is also transforming the way software is built across the organization.
Using an intelligent software development workflow built on AWS capabilities such as AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AIDLC), Southwest adopts a more agent-driven way of working. In this model, AI agents help drive development forward, while engineering teams remain responsible for guiding, validating, and owning the results.
