AI Integration Boosts Airline Customer Service Efficiency

According to a Mint story, IndiGo and Air India are incorporating AI-based technologies into their customer support platforms in order to use virtual assistants to manage a greater number of client inquiries. The objective of this method is to enhance the effectiveness of their customer service operations by decreasing response times.

As of November 2023, IndiGo’s chatbot ‘6Eskai’ has reduced customer service operators’ burden by 75%, the company told Mint. The airline and Microsoft collaborated to build 6Eskai. OpenAI’s GPT-4, a multimodal language model that can produce text from both textual and visual inputs, is used by this AI chatbot.

“We have seen over 6,000 bookings made through 6Eskai over the website and mobile application,” an IndiGo representative said to Mint. Over 39,000 boarding cards have been given by the chatbot since March 2024.”

The representative continued, “We also perform daily scans of the customer chat interactions to improve our customers’ overall experience with regard to the AI chatbot.”

With the support of the Tata group, Air India has started to see the advantages of generative AI in its customer care operations. Air India unveiled “AI.g,” a virtual agent with generative AI, in 2023. To date, this virtual assistant has answered more than two million consumer inquiries, handling jobs that would have otherwise needed a real customer support representative.

Air India has attained a containment ratio of 93% after implementing AI.g, which means that only 7% of customer inquiries require escalation to a human agent. The airline told Mint that the virtual agent “addresses over 1,300 topics, responds in a manner akin to a human, and utilizes general knowledge—a capability not present in earlier versions of AI-based tools.”

To enhance the user experience, Air India is now incorporating computer vision technologies into its mobile app. The airline is also using artificial intelligence in a number of marketing capacities on its mobile app and website. Over the next year or two, artificial intelligence and associated technologies are expected to be adopted at an even greater rate.