United Airlines CFO Confirms: AI Has Taken Over—8% Of Jobs Gone, Here’s Who Gets Cut Next

United CFO Mike Leskinen reported during the airline’s third quarter earnings call this morning that they’re replacing people with machines at headquarters – AI is driving a reduction in the carrier’s staffing.

We’re making process changes and using AI to make the work of our headquarters management team more efficient too. In fact, our management headcount is 4% lower than last year. As this efficiency work continues, we’re planning to shrink another 4% in 2026.

This seems obvious, but I haven’t seen airlines report getting ahead of the technology curve on this. They’re heavily regulated dinosaur businesses for the most part.

In fact, most of where we’ve seen AI in travel has been pretty inept. Marriott now fails to upgrade elites using AI instead of leaving it to manual labor. Hertz has unleashed AI to nickel and dime customers more for minor dings and scrapes they’re unlikely to ever bother fixing.

However, we’re going to see people replaced by AI across organizations. In 5 years how many people will there be working in finance functions below the level of the controller? At airlines it seems displacement is especially likely to occur:

• Contact center / reservations / social care. A large share of chats, emails, and calls finally get handled by computer and customers won’t know the difference. Rebookings within fare rules can easily be handled this way, not just seat changes, baggage tracking, and issuing vouchers during irregular operations. Only edge cases will need escalation.

• Back office operations from accounts payable and receivable to revenue accounting, document extraction and simple actions will have machines replacing agents manually keying things in and doing first line review. Already “offers & orders”/modern retailing pushes automation in revenue processes.

• Marketing/CRM/loyalty servicing. An area closest to my own heart, drafting marketing copy, segmenting customer lists, and handling everything from FAQs to terms and conditions should be handled primarily by AI. Humans will focus on partnerships, while GenAI will measure campaign performance.

• Revenue management analysts. Delta already says that this is happening so that prices update on a virtually continuous basis. Human revenue management, in their telling, has been a bottleneck. Computers do better at demand forecasting and pricing, with humans shifting into broader strategy and guardrails on the AI’s price-setting. Politics is a barrier here with concerns over individually-tailored prices though concerns here, at least in the medium-term, are largely overblown.

  

• Network planning & schedule optimization. Figuring out how to optimize aircraft utilization, and how to handle this against fleet maintenance, airport curfews, and network connectivity will be better done by computers.

  

• Crew pairing/rostering and disruption recovery. When Southwest melted down at Christmas 2022, their binding constraint was compute. So, too, with Delta trying to recover from the Crowdstrike meltdown. They couldn’t rebuild their schedules. Southwest operated at a portion of its schedul efor days as they handled re-pairing crews with flights manually. Combinatorial solvers and learning systems will optimize this in minutes, while internalizing union work rules.

  

• Maintenance planning & technical publications search. Shifting to predictive maintenance and tracking will mean fewer maintenance analysts. It won’t mean less maintenance, and probably not fewer maintenance techs – for awhile – given the long aircraft replacement cycle.

  

This doesn’t even get into airport operations and gate management, baggage and virtually any activity on the ramp where it’s ultimately robots that may replace people.

Where we won’t see automation for some time are in functions performed by or heavily regulated by the government. While eventually AIs will outperform co-pilots from a safety perspective, the Air Line Pilots Association is a formidably lobbying force for a two-pilot cockpit (unions once lobbied to protect the four pilot cockpit of decades ago). Flight attendants are legally mandated (in most cases at 1 per 50 seats).

And while technology allows us to really rethink the premise of air traffic control that’s a government and safety function that, too, will tend towards inertia.

4% annual reduction in headcount is largely lip service at this point, even if it at least signals taking the idea of societal changes seriously. Surely 30% – 50% of customer contacts can be handled by AI already, and 20% – 40% of back office work as well. It won’t be long at all until 30% of revenue management updates are easily handled by machine. Most crew re-pairings can happen that way pretty quickly.

(HT: Enilria)