■ CRITICAL RISK ■ Customer Service
Mostly, yes — and mostly, it already did. Between online booking, kiosks, and phone apps that are your boarding pass, the transaction that defined the job disappeared; what's left is professional bad-news delivery during irregular operations.
“Online booking made you a kiosk with feelings.”
Our AI replacement risk score — how we score jobs
Once, a ticket agent sold you the ticket: quoting fares, building itineraries, taking payment, printing documents, checking bags, and assigning seats. Airlines, rail operators, and event venues all staffed counters with people who performed lookups on systems customers couldn't touch. Then customers got the systems. Online booking took the sales transaction, kiosks and apps took check-in, bag-drop automation took the luggage tag, and dynamic pricing algorithms took the fare quote. The counter itself has physically shrunk at most airports — walk through a terminal renovated in the last decade and count the desks.
AI is now claiming the remnant tasks. Chatbots handle rebooking queries, airline apps automatically rebook passengers during cancellations and push the new itinerary before they've left the gate area, and biometric boarding is removing even the document check. The transaction volume that justified full counter staffing is simply gone, and carriers staff accordingly — lean crews concentrated at hubs, hours cut at outstations.
What survives is the irregular-operations specialist: the person who untangles a missed connection involving three carriers and an unaccompanied minor, handles medical emergencies and passengers with disabilities, exercises waiver judgment the app won't, and absorbs the emotional weather of a cancelled final flight home. That work is genuinely hard to automate — it's negotiation, empathy, and rule-bending under pressure. But airlines need dozens of those people where they once needed hundreds of transactional agents, which is exactly what a 93 looks like in practice. The industry's own staffing language gives it away: postings describe 'customer service agents' who float between gate, counter, and bag drop — one person covering what used to be three positions, with the apps covering the rest.
Automatability: our editorial assessment of current and near-term AI capability
The heavy disruption already landed — online booking and kiosks gutted counter staffing over the past two decades. The current wave is AI rebooking and biometric boarding removing much of what remained, rolling out at major airports and carriers now. Through this decade, expect ticket counters to keep consolidating into small irregular-operations teams, with venue box offices and rail windows following the same curve slightly behind.
Yes, but the job has been rebranded and thinned — often titled 'customer service agent' and focused on bag drop oversight, gate work, and disruption handling rather than ticket sales. Hiring continues because turnover is high, but staffing per flight keeps falling as apps and kiosks absorb transactions. It's an accessible entry job, not a growing one.
Automatic rebooking is the big one: systems now reaccommodate passengers during cancellations before an agent could open the reservation, deflating the queues that justified staffing. Biometric boarding and self-service bag drop remove document checks and tagging. What AI doesn't touch yet: passengers who need persuasion, exceptions, or someone to absorb their day going wrong.
As a foot in the door of aviation, genuinely yes — the flight benefits are real and internal mobility is the industry's open secret. As a destination, no. The smart play is using it as a two-year launchpad into operations, dispatch coordination, supervision, or corporate roles, building the disruption-handling experience that remains valuable while transaction work evaporates.
Exceptions and regulations. Passengers with disabilities, unaccompanied minors, international document checks the software can't verify, oversized baggage, and meltdown-day rebooking all require humans — and some assistance is legally mandated. Counters persist as exception desks. The visible trend: fewer positions open, shorter staffed hours, and floor staff redirecting everyone else to the kiosks.