General sales and service agents (GSSAs) will push deeper into airline operations over the next few years, selling everything from sales representation to payment collection, and could emerge as capacity brokers for the wave of new entrants now operating their own aircraft, industry executives said at the Aviation Connect event in Athens.

Speaking on a panel examining the future of the GSSA model, Sebastiaan Scholte, chief executive of Kales Group, identified a fresh customer base for agents: the shippers, shipping companies, e-commerce platforms, freight forwarders and ACMI providers that have all become aircraft operators in recent years.

"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. Who better can commercialise this space?" Scholte told the audience.

The commercial logic is straightforward. New cargo operators without established sales networks face the same problem legacy carriers once solved with GSSAs — empty belly space on weak legs and directional imbalances across their networks. Agents that already sell capacity across multiple airline portfolios can monetise those gaps without the operator building a sales organisation of its own.

For airlines, the consequences cut both ways. Scholte argued that agents will take on an even broader operational mandate, increasingly offering back-office services to carriers and deploying AI tools to improve aircraft utilisation. He also predicted GSSAs would come to operate as "virtual airlines".

"Many airlines want a Total Cargo Management (TCM) 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."

Vitaly Smilianets of Awery Aviation Software, whose systems are used by many GSSAs, agreed that the TCM trend has already gathered pace.

"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," Smilianets 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 a further extension of the agent's remit: financial services. Airlines, he suggested, will increasingly hand payment collection to their GSSAs, moving the model beyond sales and marketing into cash-flow functions carriers have traditionally kept in-house.

Emma Oliver, managing director of TCM provider Northwind Global Logistics, framed the next differentiator around data rather than services. GSSAs, she said, will play an important role in creating a single source of truth across the air cargo chain.

"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 systems integration — with airlines on one side and freight forwarders on the other — as the direction of travel. "Being connected to the airlines, being connected to the freight forwarders, is where we are going to be in the future," he said.

That connectivity push carries a casualty. Kazmierczak argued the deepening integration could come at the expense of third-party booking portals, as airlines push to capture more bookings directly on their own platforms — with GSSAs acting as the connective tissue between carrier systems and the forwarder community rather than intermediaries routed through independent marketplaces.

For forwarders, the shift promises cleaner data flows and fewer booking layers; for smaller airlines and new cargo operators, it offers a route to global sales reach without fixed overhead. The trajectory the Athens panel sketched suggests the GSSA of the coming years will look less like a sales agent and more like an outsourced cargo division — with the breadth of TCM mandates and capacity brokerage deals set to define which agents capture that growth.