Air India reduces call center cost with use of artificial intelligence | Company News

Airline major Air India has managed to reduce its call centre costs with the use of artificial intelligence. Senior executives from the company said that the airline has seen a huge impact on its call centre volumes with the AI integration.

The airline had 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.

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,” said Ramaswamy. “There are a lot of complex scenarios where, at least at the moment, there is a need for contact centre agents,” he added.

“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 centres. The company has been able to improve the performance of the contact centres with the help of software technology from Salesforce. The passenger count has doubled over two years, but the number of contact centres has not grown proportionately.

Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO and 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.”

Air India’s achievement of reducing its call centre costs by using AI seems to be going the way K Krithivasan, CEO and managing director, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), had said on how AI will impact call centres.

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

First Published: Jun 19 2024 | 5:56 PM IST