Air India cuts call centre costs with use of AI

The use of artificial intelligence by Air India has had a huge impact on the airline major’s call centre volumes. The technology integration has reduced costs by 100 times.

The airline launched its own chatbot AI.g, earlier known as Maharaja, in May 2023 and has answered approximately two million queries since its launch. The chatbot has handled 93 percent of customer inquiries without needing to pass them on to call centre agents, according to Sathya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India.

The chatbot operates in four languages, English, German, French, and Hindi. Other Indian languages will be rolled out in the future.  

While speaking at the ‘Salesforce World Tour Essentials India’ in Mumbai, Ramaswamy said, "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.”    

Every month, Air India gets 555,000 calls to its contact centers. Salesforces has enabled the airline company to improve the performance of the contact centers. 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."