Indian air carriers and airports are fast adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools to identify passenger profiles better and improve service standards at various points of engagement, industry stakeholders said.

“There is a lot of buzz in the industry on the use of artificial intelligence, especially about how one can generate value for customers. Air India, and all our customers are looking at ways to collaborate on it. Recently, IndiGo developed its own bot (an automatic interactive software),” Subramanian Ganeshan, senior vice president, engineering, Amadeus, told Mint.

Madrid-based Amadeus is a technology firm that provides software solutions for the global travel and tourism industry. Currently, the company is engaged in more than 250 artificial intelligence-based experiments and expects a more prominent presence of artificial intelligence-based systems across the travel ecosystem over the next 1-2 years.

AI in customer support

“We expect more of artificial intelligence usage in areas around servicing, customer support, digital virtual assistant, and Indian airlines are also assessing ways which will help them to push the most relevant information to travellers during their journeys,” Ganeshan said.

The company recently launched a product for corporate clients, which will use generative artificial intelligence to push travel solutions to the entire corporate group meant to travel for a work event. Generative artificial intelligence refers to the capability of artificial intelligence-enabled machines to use existing text, audio files, or images to create new content.

“We are getting interest from our airline customers about this,” he added.

Ganeshan said that while newer airports are digital and cloud-first, older airports are also leaving no stone unturned to move to a better technology-led ecosystem.

Delhi airport introducing airport operations system

Delhi international airport, the country’s largest and busiest with annual traffic of 73.7 million passengers, is introducing airport operations system which is a predictive tool and monitors data real time. The airport is also assessing installation of artificial intelligence-guided automatic people-mover for transportation of passengers between terminals.

“We are in the process of putting up an AI engine which will take data from the past and will predict what the plan of the day is. Depending on the turn-up and profile of passengers, we can make an early plan and that can be shared with all people who are in the passenger processing service, whether it is airlines, immigration, security, customs etc,” Videh Kumar Jaipuriar, chief executive officer, Delhi International Airport Ltd, said.

The airport has also started using newer technologies to study the profile of passengers, especially at the immigration area, in order to reduce wait time for international passengers arriving with electronic visas.

Jaipuriar reiterated that while the advent of newer technologies has expedited decision-making for customer-facing departments, the airport has always undertaken passenger profiling as this data has helped the airport to plan services better for the customers at the terminal.

“Based on passenger profiling, we have found interesting patterns and we always upgrade depending on the findings. Currently, close to 25-30% of people going abroad from Delhi are OCIs (overseas citizens of India). They look for souvenirs, Indian sweets and snacks. They also want familiarity with brands that they see abroad in foods and beverages, and they want some newly grown premium brands to experience,” he said.

“With more growth driven by hub ambition, we expect fine-dining to go up, and we are looking to add those opportunities,” he added.

 

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