Air India is probably undertaking the biggest corporate restructuring the world has ever seen. Since being acquired by the Tata Group, the troubled carrier has strategically utilised technology to enhance its services and customer experience.
Prior to the takeover, Air India drastically lacked in providing good customer service and experience to its customers compared to its competitors. To change things around, the carrier is turning its attention to AI.
Last year, Air India became the first carrier in the world to deploy an LLM-powered chatbot, called Maharaja (now renamed to AI.G). Initially, the chatbot was powered by OpenAI’s GPT3.5, but Viju Chacko, VP – head of digital architecture at Air India, revealed that the company has shifted to GPT-4 to power its AI assistant.
“We were using GPT3.5, but have now transitioned to GPT-4,” Chacko revealed while speaking at GitHub Galaxy 2024, held in Bengaluru.
However, Satya Ramaswamy, chief digital and technology officer at Air India, recently told AIM that the carrier is now experimenting with GPT-4o.
“We are actively working on integrating GPT-4 Omni, and it will have multimodal capabilities,” he said on the sidelines of the Salesforce World Tour Essentials event in Mumbai.
Multimodal is the future
Air India envisions a scenario where AI agents could play an important role in customer service.
“Currently, customer service agents are often occupied with typing into their systems to pull out customer information. Our goal is to automate these tasks with AI,” said Ramaswamy.
He added that the AI agent will pull out all the information so that the human agents can focus completely on engaging with customers in a genuine and empathetic manner without distractions.
Can AI agents book tickets on your behalf?
Nonetheless, Ramaswamy said that the carrier is taking a measured approach when it comes to leveraging AI. Currently, there are over thousands of use cases, however, booking a flight ticket is not one of them.
“In our mind, traditional booking is not a compelling use case for the chatbot because there are so many nuances to it. The customer may want to customise the booking and add different options. Hence, it's better if a human handles it,” he said.
However, he did reveal that they have found an innovative way which will allow customers to book a ticket with just one click. This novel way of flight booking could be live within a year.
For instance, if you want to make a reservation, you can simply type in your request, such as “need to travel from Bombay to Delhi on a particular date”.
“Using your past history and preferences, it will present you with a single screen where you can confirm your choice with a click, and it will automatically proceed to book your ticket,” he added.
Bringing AI to Air India’s mobile app
Moreover, Air India is enhancing its mobile application with advanced AI capabilities. The airline intends to integrate computer vision into the app, allowing users to obtain real-time flight status and additional information about their destination, including weather conditions and other relevant details, with just a single scan of their boarding pass.
AI.G is also available through the mobile app. Earlier this year, Air India launched a WhatsApp version of the chatbot.
The chatbot currently understands four languages: Hindi, English, German, and French. According to Ramaswamy, AI.G will be able to understand more languages, especially Indic languages, in the future.
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