Domestic service Air India became the world’s first airline to successfully deploy a generative AI virtual agent called ‘Maharaja’. The Tata Sons-owned airline company launched a pilot of this AI-based agent in March 2023. The AI-based agent can answer 6,000 queries in four languages in a day.
Air India’s Maharaja AI agent, which is powered by Azure OpenAIservice has already answered more than half a million customer queries since its pilot launch.This agent is trained to answer customer queries across 1,300 topics. This includes flight status, baggage allowances, flight changes, refunds, check-in, frequent flyer awards, airport lounge access, packing restrictions and more.
Air India’s Maharaja currently supports four languages — Hindi, English, French, and German. The company’s officials have confirmed that 80% of the 6,000-plus queries it receives every day are successfully answered in seconds. Meanwhile, 15% of customer queries need additional assistance. Maharaja can automatically recognise these questions and can smoothly direct them to Air India’s contact centre agents, the officials noted.
Here’s what Air India and Microsoft said about Maharaja
In a statement, Dr Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India, said:
“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.”
Air India’s Maharaja AI agent, which is powered by Azure OpenAIservice has already answered more than half a million customer queries since its pilot launch.This agent is trained to answer customer queries across 1,300 topics. This includes flight status, baggage allowances, flight changes, refunds, check-in, frequent flyer awards, airport lounge access, packing restrictions and more.
Air India’s Maharaja currently supports four languages — Hindi, English, French, and German. The company’s officials have confirmed that 80% of the 6,000-plus queries it receives every day are successfully answered in seconds. Meanwhile, 15% of customer queries need additional assistance. Maharaja can automatically recognise these questions and can smoothly direct them to Air India’s contact centre agents, the officials noted.
Here’s what Air India and Microsoft said about Maharaja
In a statement, Dr Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India, said:
“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 of AI Platform at Microsoft said:
“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 organisations use the power of Generative AI and our AI-optimized Azure cloud to provide a seamless and efficient customer experience.”