Dallas Fort Worth International Airport

Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) sits between its owner cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. It was dedicated in September 1973 and opened on January 13, 1974; the airport says it now serves more than 86 million customers a year through five terminals and more than 160 gates, and ranks third in the world by operations and fourth by passengers.¹ It also states that it supports 684,000 direct and indirect jobs.¹

For MetaRoles, DFW matters as an operator that has tested AI in concierge and information-desk work. Its Innovation team built a digital human concierge with IBM Watson and Soul Machines and tested it near gate A-34 in Terminal A until June 25, 2021, saying it would use the results to evaluate the concierge’s potential.² The successor, Digital Iris, went into Terminal B information kiosks in June 2022 as a pilot program; Soul Machines said in October 2022 that she had handled “thousands of conversations” on flights, gates, restaurants and maps, was designed to augment airport support staff, and that DFW planned to expand her across the airport.³

In the same summer, DFW hosted a demonstration of LG’s CLOi GuideBot in Terminal D (gates D1 to D4) through July 25, 2022. The robot guided travelers to points of interest, showed flight details and concession options and helped with mobile ordering; an airport executive said the goals included evaluating its ease of use and the level of support it needed from employees, and that it supplemented existing employee wayfinding resources.⁴ DFW said it would analyze the demonstration’s data and run its own customer satisfaction surveys.⁵ These cases are covered in event concierge and guide robots, AI and robot receptionists and building concierge robots and AI; MetaRoles found no later public statement on either pilot.