Glasgow Airport in Scotland will host trials of three new technologies from Beam Connectivity, Createc and Wordnerds, as part of the fourth year of its Connected Airport Living Lab. The programme gives UK SMEs a live airport environment in which to develop, test and demonstrate late-stage technology.

Glasgow Airport is located in Paisley, Renfrewshire, and is owned by AGS Airports, held 78% by AviAlliance and 22% by Blackstone Infrastructure. It handled 8.2 million passengers in 2025, and AGS Airports reported revenue of 229 million pounds for the year, with a loss of 92 million pounds.

Funded by Innovate UK, the lab is run by Connected Places Catapult with the airport, which set three challenges: managing the performance of large assets such as escalators, lifts, scanners and car park barriers, understanding passenger sentiment, and combining sentiment data from sources including social media, intelligent voice recognition and formal complaints. Each selected company receives 30,000 pounds and bespoke commercial support, plus industry connections and access to airport facilities.

Beam Connectivity will trial its Connectivity as a Service platform, which gives real-time visibility into asset health and performance to help engineering teams reduce disruption and deliver more reliable passenger journeys.

Createc is headquartered in Cockermouth, Cumbria, and specialises in robotics, artificial intelligence and advanced sensing. It turned over 7.3 million pounds in 2023, and will trial Situate, which combines anonymous LiDAR movement data with live passenger feedback to show how crowding, queues and waiting affect the airport experience, producing a live experience score, trends and early warnings.

Wordnerds, based in Gateshead and founded in 2017, uses natural language processing and machine learning to turn disparate customer feedback into insight. It will build bespoke models trained on passenger feedback and operational data to understand what drives satisfaction, using AI and agentic reporting.

“Glasgow Airport has become a proving ground for innovative technologies that can solve real operational challenges while improving the passenger experience,” said Gavin Birch-Williams, managing director of Glasgow Airport. “The success of previous cohorts has demonstrated the value of giving SMEs access to a live airport environment, allowing them to test and refine their solutions in real-world conditions.”

For the sector, the trials show an airport using live operations to test asset monitoring and passenger insight tools that other UK airports could later adopt.

Source: Airport Industry News / Aberdeen Business News / Machinery