IndiGo and Air India To Use AI For Better Customer Care Services IndiGo and Air India to leverage AI-based tools to improve customer care services.

IndiGo and Air India, two prominent airlines of India, have disclosed their intentions of leveraging AI technology into the company to improve customer care services to ensure that a maximum number of customer queries are resolved at the virtual assistant level. With this, the airline's end goal is to minimise the time taken to address passenger queries while subsequently increasing the efficiency of its customer care operations.

Since the inception of IndiGo's chatbot in November 2023, 6Eskai, a sharp 75 per cent decline in the workload of its customer service agents has been observed, as per report from Mint. In a partnership with Microsoft, the low-cost carrier has unveiled 6Eskai, an advanced AI chatbot. This cutting-edge virtual assistant is powered by OpenAI's state-of-the-art GPT-4, a multimodal language model renowned for its ability to seamlessly generate text from both written and visual cues.

"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 have been issued through the chatbot," a source at IndiGo was quoted by Mint.

"The 6Eskai application is currently transferring only 2 - 9 per cent of chats to experts, as compared to Dottie (virtual chat assistant), which was transferring 14 - 19 per cent chats, thereby boosting efficiency by about 5 per cent. We also conduct daily scans of the customer chat interactions to improve the overall experience of our customers with regard to the AI chatbot," the source continued.

Generative AI, often called genAI, is a type of artificial intelligence that can create original content such as text, images, and videos based on given prompts. Air India is experiencing a significant transformation in its customer care operations thanks to generative AI-powered virtual assistants.

In 2023, Air India introduced its GenAI virtual agent, 'AI.g', which has efficiently handled over two million customer queries. With an impressive containment ratio of 93 per cent, only 7 per cent of queries need to be escalated to human agents. AI.g is proficient in managing over 1,300 topics, providing responses that mimic human interaction and utilising 'general knowledge,' a feature that was lacking in earlier AI tools.

"Beyond consumer applications, we are utilising AI, particularly Generative AI, for core enterprise functions. For instance, we have developed a CoPilot plugin on Microsoft Teams, allowing users to ask natural language questions about specific areas of our function or performance," an Air India spokesperson quoted by Mint.

Air India is advancing towards technological excellence by integrating computer vision technologies into its mobile app to enhance customer experiences. Furthermore, it is implementing artificial intelligence across various marketing areas on its website and mobile apps.