Systems would absolutely need to change. You'd need define the ruleset, develop the logic engine for automatic seat filling and program it on the platform. Then you'd need to re-design the process flow for agents to assign seats, develop relevant policies and procedures, train staff, run extensive testing and then implement on a live system. Meanwhile, the back end architecture is out of data and kludgy, and you'll need to make sure that these changes don't screw up any other kudges that have been put in place. Plus, you have to schedule the upgrade for a limited dev window (probably quartlerly), and if higher-priority changes are already booked then you're out of luck. When you are dealing with enterprise IT systems there is no such thing as a small change.

It's certainly do-able, and probably something they should do, but not the kind of thing that IT could whip up in a week or two.