On 10 September 2026, the UIC Passenger Services Group held its latest Innovation Workshop “From chat to action: will Agentic AI transform the travel experience?” at the EY Wavespace in Rome and online. Over 50 participants attended the hybrid event, representing Benerail, Bestforent, Trains of Portugal (CP), Railways of Luxembourg (CFL), Entur, FS International, FSTechnology, Hitrail, Hungarian State Railways (MÁV), Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB), Renfe, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Sener Mobility, Swedish Railways (SJ), French National Railways (SNCF), Slovenian Railways (SŽ), Trenitalia, Trenord, and UIC.
To begin, Bertrand Minary, UIC Passenger Director, opened the workshop and welcomed participants. After a round of introductions, Stefano Scarci (EY) introduced the theme with a presentation on agentic AI and its implications for the travel industry. AI agents are increasingly able to pursue goals autonomously across multiple steps and systems. Applied to travel, they can capture a traveller’s intent, handle context, compare options, make recommendations, complete bookings and support the traveller throughout the journey. This could reshape the entire travel ecosystem.
Representatives of leading railways then shared their perspectives.
Adèle Huber and Eva Krüger (SBB) presented “From customer journeys towards agentic journeys?”. For SBB, agentic AI is first of all a transformation challenge: it calls for changes to organisation and operating models, mastery of journey orchestration, marketing to two very different audiences (humans and agents) and a robust technical foundation. The key question for railways: can customers’ AI agents find us, trust us, and choose us?
Alexandre Cormeraie (SNCF) argued that AI will profoundly transform travel, not least because travellers are continuously connected to their smartphones where AI is now consistently present. Drawing on SNCF’s high-speed rail (TGV) experience, he suggested that generative coding gives railways a practical way to prepare, to build and deploy software tailored to their own needs, reducing licence costs and strengthening digital sovereignty.
A live survey among participants revealed broad agreement on several points: agentic AI will have a major impact on how railways operate by 2030; it can create significant value, for example, by handling automated rebooking during disruptions; and therefore, the industry should begin to act collectively now.
Participants then moved into breakout sessions to discuss ideas around three questions:
- How should railways make their offer visible and bookable by AI agents, working with platforms and aggregators?
- How can railways use agentic AI to improve the passenger experience and own the relationship end to end?
- How should the industry develop common standards, specifications, and shared capabilities through UIC to succeed in the agentic era?
The discussions were lively and produced a numerous ideas, which participants then prioritised together.
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The programme also included a live demonstration by Seid Maglajlic (Bestforent) of BrainTrainAI, a railway regulatory intelligence platform that applies AI to knowledge management in support of compliance.
The next Innovation Workshop “From mass to one-to-one in rail: real-time hyper-personalised information and offers” will take place on 28 October 2026 in Paris.
