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Two major Indian airlines, Indigo and Air India, have announced their intention to bring AI technology in-house to improve their customer care services and resolve maximum customer queries at virtual assistant level, with the ultimate goal of airlines minimizing the time spent responding to passenger queries and increasing the efficiency of customer care operations.
According to a Mint report, since the launch of IndiGo's chatbot, 6Eskai, in November 2023, the company has seen a sharp decline in the workload of its customer service agents by 75%. The low-cost airline partnered with Microsoft to launch an advanced AI chatbot, 6Eskai. The cutting-edge virtual assistant is powered by OpenAI's state-of-the-art GPT-4, a multi-modal language model known for its ability to seamlessly generate text from both written and visual cues.
“More than 6,000 bookings have been made through the 6Eskai website and mobile app. More than 39,000 boarding passes have been issued through the chatbot from March 2024 to date,” an IndiGo source told Mint.
“The 6Eskai application currently transfers only 2-9% of chats to experts, whereas Dottie (virtual chat assistant) transfers 14-19% of chats, which is about a 5% increase in efficiency. We are also scanning customer chat interactions on a daily basis to improve customers' overall experience with the AI chatbot,” the source continued.
Generative AI (also known as genAI) is a type of artificial intelligence that can create original content like text, images, videos etc. based on given prompts. Air India is revolutionising its customer care operations, thanks to a generative AI-powered virtual assistant.
In 2023, Air India deployed its GenAI virtual agent, AI.g, which has efficiently handled over 2 million customer queries. With an impressive 93% capacity rate, only 7% of queries need to be escalated to a human agent. AI.g excels in managing over 1,300 topics, providing responses that mimic human interactions and leverages “general knowledge,” a feature not seen in previous AI tools.
“Beyond consumer-facing applications, we are also leveraging AI, particularly generative AI, in core enterprise functions. For example, we have developed a CoPilot plugin on Microsoft Teams to enable users to ask questions in natural language about specific areas of our capabilities and performance,” an Air India spokesperson told Mint.
Air India is striving towards technological excellence by integrating computer vision technology in its mobile app to enhance customer experience.Furthermore, it is implementing artificial intelligence in various marketing areas on its website and mobile app.
