New Delhi: The usual scripted automated responses to queries and complaints on social media platforms can be frustrating and airlines are increasingly realizing that it impacts the customer experience and hurts brand value.
India’s largest airline has noticed this as a problem over the past few weeks and has started working on technological solutions to provide more informative and precise responses, to queries and complaints by travelllers, which would aim to address their concerns and anxiety about a delay, cancellation, or any other grievance.
“In our evolution of implementing skai (AI chatbot) into various use cases, this is a use case we have just kind of started looking at, and over the next year we will make an attempt to help the humans responding on social media, get them augmented with artificial intelligence. So, that is currently project in progress, we have just started the feasibility of it and our hope is to deliver it this year,” Neetan Chopra – chief digital and information officer, IndiGo, told Mint.
IndiGo launched an AI chatbot, 6Eskai, powered by GPT-4 technology in November 2023. It was developed in-house by IndiGo’s digital team, in close collaboration with Microsoft. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 is a multimodal large language model that generates text from textual and visual input. By consistently scanning customer chats, the airline is also working on making its 6Eskai platform more emotional in its responses to customers.
The airline has been working with IBM subsidiary Red Hat, which provides open source software products to enterprises, to improve the efficiency and experience of over 100 applications for IndiGo by adopting newer technological tools.
“Our job is to try and make sure that the innovation goes faster and so that the systems can learn a lot quicker because if a lot of the AI models today are all proprietary and we are trying to make AI a lot more open source so, the innovation can help us to short circuit this entire learning,” Viju Chakarapany, vice president, Commercial Sales, Red Hat Asia Pacific, said.
IndiGo, in collaboration with Red Hat, has also been working to get the right talent for the development of the applications. The two companies have organized two drives to hire full-stack developers and is expected to conduct a third drive soon.
In line with automation of tasks and more use of technology, Red Hat said that it is also working on creating more solutions for airlines across other aspects of services.
“We are trying to co-innovate to come up with something which can be disruptive to make sure that the customer has the best benefit. And that’s the next stage that we are trying to do. We already started on some of it. We are trying to take AI into meal allocations, health of planes, utilization of crew for better customer experience, faster and safer flights,” Chakarapany said.
Under in-flight experience digitization, the airline had upgraded its application with effect from May to include limited access to television shows, movies, etc. on flights between Delhi-Goa sector for three months.
“…that trial was supposed to be for 90 days so we’re just waiting for the results of the trial before we decide whether to scale it or not,” Chopra said.
The airline’s revamped website and application is set to launch next month officially but the version is ready to be tested and will be released to a select few customers as a part of beta testing and launch.