Overview: On October 12, according to an article titled "AI in Airports" on the Amadeus website, the travel technology company proposed a direction for airports: "connected intelligent operations." This involves combining AI, shared data, and intelligent orchestration to help airports optimize operations, improve decision-making, and enhance efficiency. Its core principle can be summarized as follows: airport intelligence should not rely solely on individual tools, but rather enable the entire airport to operate collaboratively based on shared data.
According to an article on the Amadeus website, its AI airport framework consists of three elements: AI is responsible for perception and judgment, shared data ensures information flows between departments, and intelligent orchestration translates decisions into concrete operational actions. As the article states, the goal is to help airports optimize operations, improve decision-making, and enhance efficiency – not to make each department "smarter" individually, but to enable the entire airport to perceive and respond to changes more quickly as a whole. In reality, the intelligence of most airports remains at the "isolated intelligence" stage – security has one AI system, baggage handling has a predictive model, and the apron has a separate inspection tool, with data not shared between them. This limits the scope of AI's judgment to individual departments.
“Integrated intelligent operations” aims to solve this very problem: by bringing together data on flight schedules, passenger flow, baggage flow, and aircraft stand resources into a single platform, the scope of AI optimization can be expanded from individual processes to the entire operational chain.
Based on publicly available reports, similar approaches have already been implemented in various settings. According to a 2026 airport technology trends report published by oxmaint, biometric boarding gates, digital twins (simulating entire operations within a system), and predictive analytics with real-time data integration are becoming common components of airport digitalization. The New York Times reported that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) plans to deploy AI-assisted air traffic management tools at airports in the Washington D.C. area starting in mid-September. This system, which costs $875 million, is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2028.
The common thread among these cases is that AI is no longer just an efficiency tool for a single department; it is now involved in cross-departmental operational decision-making processes.
Amadeus has emphasized “intelligent orchestration,” and similar initiatives are already underway in the industry. According to OAG, London Heathrow Airport has selected the AIRHART platform, developed by Smarter Airports, a joint venture between Copenhagen Airport and Netcompany, as its digital foundation. This platform is also positioned as an “AI-driven, data-centric” orchestration platform. According to Future Travel Experience, this is a multi-year plan. Airport technology suppliers and airport-owned platforms are simultaneously investing in orchestration layers, indicating that a consensus is forming within the industry: the next stage of competition will focus on the “airport operating system,” rather than individual applications.
For airports, choosing a provider for the orchestration layer essentially means deciding who will control future data governance. The coexistence of the supplier's platform and the airport's platform also indicates that data standards and the degree of openness will become key factors in future digital procurement processes, rather than just focusing on the list of features.
The bottleneck for AI in airports has never been the algorithms themselves, but rather the ability to share data across different departments. Amadeus's "shared data + intelligent orchestration" provides a conceptual framework, while Heathrow's AIRHART and the FAA's AI traffic management offer practical examples. The key question moving forward is governance: how to divide the data responsibilities and rights among airports, airlines, ground service providers, and air traffic control will determine whether "full-field collaboration" remains a vision or becomes a reality.