Air India has successfully deployed a Generative AI virtual agent that is changing the standard of service it offers its passengers.
Called ‘Maharaja’, the virtual agent handles passenger queries related to flight status, baggage, check-in, lounge access, flight changes, refunds, frequent flyer awards, lounge access, flight changes, refunds and more.
And it even does this in four languages: Hindi, English, French, and German.
Maharaja uses the famous ChatGPT to provide a personalised passenger experience. It understands the intent and context of a query and generates a natural and coherent reply.
This enhances the passenger experience and satisfaction while reducing the need for human intervention.
About 15% of passenger queries today require additional assistance. Maharaja recognises this and automatically hands the queries to Air India passenger service agents.
To date, Maharaja has successfully answered over half a million passenger questions since its pilot launch in March 2023 and currently manages over 6,000 queries a day.
Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India:
“We are dedicated to providing the best possible service and experience to our valued guests across channels. We also want to be very responsive to their changing preferences. After the emergence of Large Language Model driven Generative AI capabilities, we are increasingly seeing a definitive shift in guest preferences to use chat interactions to get the information and support they need quickly and directly as compared to browsing several web pages.”
“We have used several patent-pending innovations in our AI agent Maharaja with a combination of traditional machine learning techniques and the latest in Generative AI to provide a pleasing and effective experience for our customers. Many more innovations are in the pipeline and will be made live in the months to come.”
Marco Casalaina, Vice President, AI Platform, Microsoft:
“We are pleased to see Air India’s successful deployment of their AI-powered agent, Maharaja, and the use of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to provide a personalized and relevant customer experience. We believe that this is the beginning of a new era of customer service, and we look forward to seeing more organizations use the power of Generative AI and our AI-optimized Azure cloud to provide a seamless and efficient customer experience.”
Future plans
In the coming months, Air India plans to launch a host of sophisticated features.
This includes a novel user experience that changes the way passengers interact with AI agents with a combination of textual and graphical interactions that can potentially further speed up passenger interactions.
Air India also plans to enhance the current AI agent with data-driven deep personalisation capabilities that will include travel inspiration and effortless booking experiences.
Support for more Indian languages is also in the works.
