Air India banks on artificial intelligence to cut call centre costs

The airline had launched its own chatbot AI.g, earlier known as Maharaja, in May 2023

Air India’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) has had a huge impact on the airline major’s call centre volumes and the technology integration has reduced costs by 100 times, a senior company executive said on Wednesday.

The airline launched its own chatbot AI.g, earlier known as Maharaja, in May 2023. The chatbot has answered approximately two million queries since its launch, handling 93 per cent of customer inquiries without needing to pass them on to call centre agents, said Sathya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India. The chatbot currently operates in four languages, English, German, French, and Hindi. Other Indian languages are set to be rolled out in the future.

Ramaswamy was speaking at the Salesforce event ‘Salesforce World Tour Essentials India’ in Mumbai.

"It is very disruptive, obviously, but we don't believe that the contact centre agents will disappear entirely. There are a lot of complex scenarios where at least at the moment, there is a need for contact centre agents. We have achieved a first call resolution rate of about 80 per cent today, a lot of that can be attributed to Salesforce's ability to integrate multiple Air India systems,” said Ramaswamy. 

Air India receives 555,000 calls every month to its contact centers. The company has been able to improve the performance of the contact centers with the help of software technology from Salesforce. The passenger count has doubled over two years, but the number of contact centers has not grown proportionately.

Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO & chairperson, Salesforce India, during her keynote presentation, said, “AI is going to augment every one of you, your enterprises and the solutions that Salesforce gives to you. It has the ability to improve your productivity, margins, and create better customer relationships. Our survey of the India C-Suite says that 94 per cent of the people believe that this is going to be so."

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Air India’s achievement of reducing its call centre cost by using AI seems to be going the way K Krithivasan, MD and CEO, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) had predicted.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Krithivasan stated that the advancement of AI will lead to a decrease in call center demand. "We are in a situation where technology should be able to predict a call and address it accordingly," he had said.