Southwest Airlines has named Amazon Web Services its preferred cloud provider and will transition from a largely on-premises environment to a cloud-based, AI- and agent-enabled architecture on AWS by 2028.
The move accelerates modernization of Southwest.com and expands agentic AI use across customer experience, operations, and software development.
Key Terms and Timeline
- AWS becomes Southwest’s preferred cloud provider.
- Southwest will move to a fully cloud-based, AI- and agent-enabled environment on AWS by 2028.
- The airline is already using Kiro, AWS’s agentic coding service, to modernize Southwest.com after historically operating a large on-premises footprint with long modernization timelines.
- Southwest is adopting the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AIDLC) and tools such as Amazon Quick as part of the expanded AI and agent-based capabilities rollout.
Current State and Scale
Southwest’s technology currently powers nearly every part of the airline — from selling seats to daily operations — for more than 73,000 full-time equivalent active employees (as of March 31, 2026) and 134 million customers carried in 2025.
The carrier carried more nonstop domestic U.S. passengers than any other airline according to U.S. Department of Transportation quarterly data as of Q4 2025.
Executive Quotes
“Southwest has always evolved 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 Customer experience, to operations, to how we build the systems behind it — all of it is coming together in a way that helps our Teams move faster, make better decisions, and deliver for our Customers.”
“Southwest Airlines is using AI to deliver on its commitment to being a customer-obsessed airline. By deploying AI agents across customer experience, operations, and software development, they’re accelerating innovation for 134 million travelers — and proving that pioneering ambition paired with AWS’s agentic AI capabilities delivers real, measurable results at scale,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Agentic AI at AWS.
What This Means
The agreement represents a significant acceleration for a carrier that previously maintained a large on-premises footprint and faced extended modernization timelines. By committing to a 2028 full cloud target and embedding agentic tools like Kiro and AIDLC into development workflows, Southwest is shifting from traditional infrastructure to AI-assisted operations and coding at scale.
The partnership directly ties cloud migration to measurable operational gains: tasks that previously took hours are targeted to be completed in minutes, with a simplified environment designed to improve system interoperability, speed, flexibility, and reliability.
Actions to Take
Southwest technology and operations teams should prioritize mapping high-impact Southwest.com workloads and legacy systems for Kiro-assisted refactoring, automated testing, and cloud infrastructure generation in the near term to stay on the 2028 timeline.
Development leaders should begin training and onboarding the more than 2,700 developers already referenced in similar Kiro deployments onto the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AIDLC) model, where AI agents assist while engineering teams retain validation and ownership.
Competitor airlines and enterprise observers should monitor Southwest’s post-migration metrics on operational reliability, customer experience speed, and internal development velocity as early indicators of whether large-scale agentic AI adoption delivers the claimed “minutes vs. hours” efficiency gains in a complex, high-volume transportation environment.
AWS enterprise sales and solutions teams can use this as a reference case for other legacy-heavy carriers or large on-premises operators seeking to compress multi-year modernization roadmaps through agentic coding and AI-first architecture commitments.