In a bid to enhance customer care services, India’s largest airlines, IndiGo and Air India, have embraced artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools. These tools are designed to efficiently handle customer queries while maintaining high-quality interactions, ultimately improving overall service delivery.
IndiGo’s implementation of its chatbot, 6Eskai, in November 2023 has significantly reduced the workload of its customer service agents by 75%. Developed in collaboration with Microsoft and powered by OpenAI’s large multimodal language model GPT-4, 6Eskai has facilitated over 6,000 bookings and issued over 39,000 boarding passes through its website and mobile application. The chatbot now transfers only 2-9% of chats to human experts, boosting efficiency by about 5%.
Air India, backed by the Tata group, has also witnessed positive outcomes from its virtual assistant, ‘AI.g’, powered by generative artificial intelligence (genAI). Since its deployment in 2023, AI.g has handled more than two million customer queries, achieving a containment ratio of 93%. This means that only 7% of queries require escalation to a human agent. Air India’s virtual agent handles over 1,300 topics, providing human-like responses and incorporating ‘general knowledge’, a feature absent in earlier versions.
Looking ahead, Air India is focused on incorporating computer vision technologies into its mobile application and deploying artificial intelligence in various marketing areas across its platforms. The airline aims to make AI use pervasive, with plans to further increase its usage over the next one to two years.
By leveraging AI-based tools, IndiGo and Air India are at the forefront of customer care innovation, setting new standards for service delivery in the Indian aviation industry.