Virgin Atlantic has adopted ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Sites to speed up research, product planning and decision-making while giving teams a connected view of the airline’s complex customer journey. The airline intends to link signals from browsing, purchase, check-in, travel, the onboard experience and post-trip feedback so teams can move from insight to action more quickly.
Why it matters for the airline
Customer journey data at the airline is spread across multiple systems and reporting tools. By using ChatGPT Work, Virgin Atlantic aims to bring those dispersed signals together, help teams prioritise where to focus, and reduce the time needed to produce actionable conclusions.
Competitive research and the five-year strategy
When Virgin Atlantic’s digital product team prepared the company’s new five-year strategy, it needed a clear, structured view of the competitive landscape. Traditionally, evaluating several competitors across a detailed customer journey could take weeks of manual research. Using ChatGPT Work the team built a structured framework and asked the tool to research competitor experiences, map available customer journeys and organise findings into a reviewable dataset.
Nathan Bolt, Head of Digital Product at Virgin Atlantic, said the tool has substantially shortened timelines: “As part of Virgin Atlantic’s five-year digital strategy, ChatGPT Work has helped us explore customer journeys and market experiences in a more structured and efficient way. It enables our teams to compare journey patterns, surface opportunities, and turn insight into product decisions far faster than before. What might once have taken weeks can now be accelerated into hours, helping us focus investment where it can make the biggest difference for our customers.”
The analysis identified where Virgin Atlantic’s digital experience is strong, which capabilities should be protected, and which opportunities justify further investment; those findings fed into recommendations for the five-year plan.
Synthesising strategy, insight and data
ChatGPT Work is also used to synthesise strategy documents, customer insights and digital experience data so that information can be explored and applied across the product lifecycle. Bolt commented that the tool has helped the company move from idea to customer-facing product more quickly: “ChatGPT has allowed us to go from idea to actual product in customers’ hands much faster.”
Data integration and authenticated dashboards
Customer experience and analytics teams previously had to navigate several dashboard tools, authenticated workspaces, licences, user profiles and reporting suites to understand different parts of the journey. With ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Sites, Virgin Atlantic is building secure, authenticated dashboards that unify disparate datasets into a common interface. Staff across the business can access relevant views, explore data more easily and make decisions for their areas.
Miles King, Head of Customer Experience at Virgin Atlantic, described the change as significant: “The ability to have a single interface that is customizable, that we can control and visualize in a way that we’ve not been able to before, has been game changing for us.”
Custom product-planning tools and day-to-day use
The teams have also used ChatGPT to create custom product-planning tools. Product teams can manage roadmaps, prioritisation, fields and quarterly planning tailored to Virgin Atlantic’s needs, while senior stakeholders see simplified, high-level views. That flexibility reduces time spent adapting processes to rigid tools and increases time spent delivering the roadmap.
Bolt also uses ChatGPT Work personally as a kind of “chief of staff” to surface important items across his calendar, Slack and email, help him act, and prepare presentations. He said: “I’m able to do more within the same workday. I’m not working longer hours necessarily, but I’m getting more done.”
Next steps
As Virgin Atlantic expands its use of ChatGPT Work, the company will continue to focus on converting insight into faster decisions and better customer experiences. As Miles King put it: “ChatGPT helps me spot what customers need, decide what matters, act faster, and deliver.”
The company framed some efficiency gains as compressing work that once took weeks into hours, but the public description did not include detailed quantitative metrics.
