Gulf airlines have cheap oil but Air India has software talent: CDTO

Middle Eastern airlines have the unique advantage of cheap oil, but Air India boasts a unique advantage of having abundant and high-quality software talent available at scale, said Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer of Air India, on Friday.

"We fully intend to exercise this unique competitive advantage by working hard to become the world’s most technologically advanced airline. We have hired more than 250 top-notch Indian Institutes of Technology graduates, including some top Indian Institutes of Technology Joint Entrance Examination rank holders, with the help of our Chief Human Resources Officer, Suresh Tripathi, and his team," he said in a message to employees.

Ramaswamy listed the technological advancements made by the airline over the last couple of years. He mentioned that the airline has completely revamped its website and mobile app. The app now features an intuitive design and options such as flight status with incoming aircraft details.

Air India has launched the world's first generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ‘AI.g’, with over one million queries answered since its launch and 20,000 queries answered per day. Of these, 93 per cent were autonomously answered without live agent escalation, he noted.

The Tata Group assumed control of Air India exactly two years ago on January 27, 2022. Vistara, a 51:49 joint venture of the Tata Group and Singapore Airlines, is in the process of merging with Air India.

Air India has created a brand-new notification platform that provides crucial updates and travel information to guests about their flights, with industry-leading features such as the popular ‘baggage received’ notification, he mentioned.

"We’ve migrated to a modern, cloud-based data platform, integrating data from all major source systems to create a silo-free, data-driven culture across the company, along with a generative AI-driven conversational interface for complex use cases. We are now one of the first airlines in the world to achieve ‘cloud-only’ infrastructure status, with no data centres," he stated.

The airline has completed more than 85 major system implementation and modernisation cutovers across various departments such as commercial, operations, safety, engineering, customer experience, and ground handling since January 2023, without any disruptions.

Ramaswamy said the airline will be launching a unified employee portal ‘myAI’ to perform all employee service activities in one place, delivering consumer-like user experiences together with a generative AI-powered enterprise virtual assistant.