A Mint report says IndiGo and Air India are integrating AI-based tools into their customer care systems by introducing virtual assistants to handle a higher volume of queries from their customers, so as to bring down the response time and increase the efficiency in their customer service operations. According to a Mint report, IndiGo claims that since November 2023, when the carriers launched its AI chatbot ‘6Eskai’, the workload of customer service agents has come down by 75%. Co-developed by the carrier with Microsoft, this AI chatbot uses OpenAI’s GPT-4, a multimodal language model that can generate text conditioned on both textual and visual inputs. acobian IndoGo spokesperson told Mint, “We have seen over 6,000 bookings made through 6Eskai over the website and mobile application. From March 2024 till date, over 39,000 boarding passes were issued through the chatbot.” We also do daily scans of the customer chat interaction to improvise the overall experience of our customers as far as the AI-based chatbot is concerned, he added. Backed by the Tata group, Air India has now started feeling the benefits of generative artificial intelligence in its customer service operations. In 2023, generative AI-based virtual agent ‘AI.g’ was rolled out by Air India. This virtual agent processed over two million queries of customers, for which earlier human customer service agents were required. “Since AI.g’s implementation, Air India is able to contain 93%, leaving only 7% of customer queries that need to be ramped up to a human agent. The virtual agent covers more than 1,300 topics, responds in a rather human-like manner, and draws upon general knowledge—a functionality lacking in earlier avatars of AI-driven tools,” the airline told Mint. Air India is currently working to integrate computer vision technologies into its mobile app for better engagement of customers. Furthermore, the domestic carrier is incorporating artificial intelligence in various marketing functions on its website and mobile app platform. The adoption of artificial intelligence and related technologies is likely to further increase during the next one to two years.
