The Human Element
How Breeze Airways is scaling HR support as fast as it's scaling its fleet
24/7 HR coverage, without a 24/7 team
Running an airline means your workforce never stops. Pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and ground crew are operating across 85+ cities at all hours. When they have a question, they need an answer, not a ticket in a queue.
For Breeze Airways' People Services team, that reality created a quiet but compounding problem. A single inbox served as the front door for every HR question across a workforce of over 2,800. Basic inquiries about travel benefits, information updates, and policy clarifications consumed hours that could have gone toward more meaningful work. And with a workforce spanning varied schedules and time zones, there was a clear opportunity to extend support beyond traditional business hours.
The challenge wasn't the complexity of any single question. It was the volume, the hours, and the sheer variety of a workforce with genuinely different needs: pilots operating under FAA regulations, flight attendants with scheduling and leave guidelines, mechanics following technical operational procedures, and corporate staff with yet another set of policies entirely.
The policy maze
When Team Members went looking for answers on their own, they faced a practical obstacle. Handbooks and policy documents lived on SharePoint, but for pilots, flight attendants, and mechanics who spend their days away from a desk, logging into a computer to track down a policy isn't always an option. Harper, integrated directly into Microsoft Teams, meets Team Members where they already are, whether that's on a tablet between flights or a phone between shifts.
The People Services team knew they needed a better way. Not just to answer questions faster, but to free themselves to focus on the work that actually required their expertise.
An AI HR teammate that knows the difference
Breeze implemented Harper, Wisq's AI HR generalist, integrated directly into Microsoft Teams, a tool Team Members already used every day.
What made Harper the right fit for Breeze was the ability to recognize who was asking a question. A pilot asking about scheduling gets an answer grounded in the pilot playbook. A flight attendant asking about leave gets a response that reflects their specific guidelines. Harper differentiates by role, not just by question, which matters enormously in an operation as complex as an airline. Furthermore, Harper also applies HR reasoning, handling each inquiry the way a member of the People Services team would.
The rollout was careful and phased. Rather than launching to all 2,800+ Team Members at once, Breeze started with the Team Member Experience team, expanded to People Services, then brought in flight attendants as the first operational group. That approach gave the Wisq and Breeze teams space to fine-tune Harper's responses to the specific nuances of each workforce segment before expanding.
As Jeff Weber, Chief People Officer at Breeze Airways, put it:
When you're running an airline with pilots, flight attendants, and crew working around the clock across 85+ cities, traditional HR models weren't built for an operation like ours. Harper gives our team members quick, accurate answers whether it's 2pm or 2am, without our People Services team having to staff a 24/7 operation. That's a game-changer for a company growing as fast as we are.
From triage to strategy
The impact showed up quickly. Questions in inboxes that once required manual triage and response by the People Services team were being resolved without human intervention. The manual work of logging, categorizing, and tracking every inquiry in ClickUp gave way to an analytics dashboard that provided the same visibility automatically.
More than the time savings, though, was the shift in what the team was being asked to do and the leverage they received. The nature of incoming requests began to change. Tier-one questions found their answers. The People Services team found themselves handling the work that actually required them.
Dina Siclovan, Director of Team Member Experience, described what the partnership made possible:
What impressed me most about Wisq wasn't just the technology—it was the partnership. They took the time to understand the complexity of our business, from FAA-regulated pilot and flight attendant policies to the distinct needs of each job role across our operation. Harper doesn't just answer questions; she handles every request with the level of professionalism and care we expect from our People Services team. The result has been a meaningful improvement in the team member experience, supported every step of the way by the Wisq team.
Built to grow
Breeze is expanding Harper's role across the organization into additional HR use cases, including areas like safety reporting and leadership development. As the airline continues adding cities and team members, Harper scales with it.
For a company built on the idea that flying should be seamless, it's fitting that getting HR support is now seamless, too.
