Southwest Airlines puts endpoint operations on autopilot with AI and automation

At a glance:

• Southwest supports ~50,000 smartphones/tablets, 20,000 laptops and 15,000 PCs for its 72,000 employees
• Remote actions jumped from 1.1 billion in 2024 to 2.1 billion in 2025, saving roughly 23,000 employee hours
• Nexthink’s AI‑driven Workspace and upcoming Spark tool shift IT from reactive tickets to proactive remediation

Digitizing the frontline

Southwest Airlines has spent the last decade swapping paper manuals for mobile devices and cloud apps across maintenance, flight operations, gate services and cabin crews. The effort now covers roughly two‑thirds of its 72,000‑strong workforce, giving pilots and ground staff real‑time digital instructions instead of printed binders. While the move has boosted operational agility, it also created a massive support burden: the end‑user computing team manages around 50,000 employee smartphones and tablets, 20,000 laptops and 15,000 PCs.

Device failures can ripple through the airline’s tightly timed turnaround process for its 800 Boeing 737 fleet. A single laptop or tablet glitch can delay gate agents, extend lines, and ultimately keep an aircraft on the ground longer than planned, directly impacting both employee satisfaction and passenger experience.

Deploying nexthink’s digital employee experience platform

To gain visibility into this sprawling device estate, Southwest adopted Nexthink’s Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution several years ago. DEX continuously monitors device performance, application reliability and IT support interactions, feeding the data to a dedicated 14‑person endpoint management group. Within that group, a full‑blown DEX operations team and a forward‑looking DEX engineering team now design and run automation pipelines.

The platform’s “remote actions” feature lets the team push fixes without user involvement. Simple tasks—such as clearing a corrupt cache that caused Microsoft Teams crashes—are executed automatically across thousands of devices. In 2024 Southwest ran 1.1 billion remote actions, equating to about 13,000 hours of employee time saved; the figure rose to 2.1 billion in 2025, delivering roughly 23,000 hours of productivity gain.

Scaling automation to avoid hardware upgrades

Southwest’s back‑office PCs number about 8,000, with up to 20 users sharing each machine. Full Microsoft 365 profiles load at login, quickly filling hard‑drive space and degrading performance. By automating the deletion of dormant user profiles (those idle for a week or more), the airline avoided a planned rollout of 1‑TB hard drives. Over the past month, roughly 5.8 million remote actions were executed, most of them targeting disk‑space reclamation—13 distinct actions run about 3 million times.

The team also tackled a 20 % failure rate in its Microsoft SCCM client by chaining remote actions that check client health, restart services, and reinstall the software when needed. Integration with ServiceNow means that severe issues—like three blue‑screen events in 24 hours—trigger automatic ticket creation, reducing the reliance on users to call the service desk.

AI‑driven conversational assistance with workspace

Beyond pure automation, Nexthink’s Workspace—a large‑language‑model (LLM) powered conversational assistant—helps analysts surface device health data, prioritize remediation tasks and even launch remote actions pre‑emptively. Whisenhunt notes that the assistant is used daily to monitor security posture, application performance and lifecycle signals, often fixing problems before employees notice them.

The shift from a ticket‑driven, reactive support model to a proactive operations stance has cut service‑desk volume, accelerated time‑to‑resolution and freed engineering capacity previously spent on repetitive fixes. Southwest is now piloting Nexthink’s Spark, an AI tool that diagnoses user problems and suggests fixes in‑situ, aiming to let staff resolve issues without opening tickets.

Balancing automation with governance

While the benefits are clear, Southwest remains cautious about AI‑related risks. Whisenhunt stresses the need for strong governance, clear guardrails and continuous validation to earn trust in automated decisions. The airline’s approach treats AI as an assistive layer that augments human expertise rather than replaces it, ensuring reliability and oversight remain central to its endpoint strategy.