General sales and service agents (GSSAs) will move deeper into airline operations, selling back-office functions, brokering spare capacity and offering financial services, according to speakers at the Aviation Connect event in Athens.

The panel's most concrete forecast centred on Total Cargo Management (TCM), a model in which the GSSA effectively becomes the airline's cargo department rather than a country-level sales agent.

Sebastiaan Scholte, chief executive of Kales Group, said the customer base for GSSAs will also broaden. Over recent years, shippers, shipping companies, e-commerce platforms, freight forwarders and ACMI providers have all become aircraft operators, and each brings commercial problems that GSSAs are positioned to solve.

"All of them have certain lanes that are not full and they also have directional imbalances, so what I see as a future role for GSSAs is to become a broker of capacity," Scholte said. "Who better can commercialise this space?"

From sales agent to "virtual airline"

Scholte argued that the TCM model allows an agent to aggregate capabilities across its airline portfolio, effectively competing as a carrier without operating aircraft.

"Many airlines want a Total Cargo Management solution where you are the de facto cargo department of the airline," he said. "The advantage of a GSSA is that, if you do it right, you will take the best of all the airlines you represent and you become the best so-called virtual airline."

He also expects GSSAs to increase their use of artificial intelligence tools to help improve aircraft utilisation, and to sell back-office services to airlines as a growing part of their offering.

Vitaly Smilianets of Awery Aviation Software, whose product is used by many GSSAs, said the shift is already measurable. "I think that GSSAs will offer more and more TCM solutions, and I think it is happening more and more in the last two to three years," he said.

"The next succession for the GSSAs is that they can take over and do everything for the airline. Airlines will get to a point where they not only outsource their sales capabilities for a specific country but outsource the whole story and even do it globally."

Smilianets added that airlines will increasingly turn to GSSAs for financial services, including payment collection — a function that extends the agent's role well beyond selling freight capacity into the carrier's cash cycle.

Data integration as differentiator

Emma Oliver, managing director of TCM provider Northwind Global Logistics, said the agents that differentiate themselves will be those that use technology to embed themselves in the airline's operations and create a single source of data across the industry.

"I think that where GSSAs can use the technology to become a better extension of the airline is where they will be able to differentiate themselves," Oliver said. "Whether that is using the platform of an airline or using their own technology to ensure seamless messaging so we have this one source of truth, one source of data, across the industry."

Pawel Kazmierczak, commercial manager at 4RCargo, pointed to the same trajectory from the connectivity side. "Being connected to the airlines, being connected to the freight forwarders, is where we are going to be in the future," he said.

He added that this deeper integration could come at the expense of third-party booking portals, as airlines push to capture more bookings directly on their own platforms.

The panel's projections point to a cargo distribution chain in which GSSAs consolidate their position between carriers and forwarders — taking on sales, administration, data and eventually finance — while new categories of aircraft operator look to agents to fill underutilised lanes.