Air India has become the world’s first airline to deploy a generative AI virtual agent, named Maharaja. The agent is powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service and handles a wide variety of customer queries across 1300 domains, such as flight status, baggage allowances, check-in, packing restrictions, airport lounge access, frequent flyer awards, refunds, and flight changes.

Maharaja has already responded to over a million customer queries and currently handles more than 6,000 daily queries in four different languages: Hindi, English, German, and French. The agent successfully answers about 80% of queries in seconds. For the remaining 15% of queries, Maharaja requires additional assistance and transfers them to Air India’s contact center agents.

The deployment of Maharaja is part of Air India’s broader digital strategy, which includes the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other emerging technologies to improve the customer experience.

“We are dedicated to providing the best possible service and experience to our valued guests across channels,” said Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Air India. “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.”

Air India has implemented safeguards to prevent biased or foul language from infiltrating its conversational AI system. The company is also using a combination of traditional machine learning techniques and generative AI to ensure that the system is accurate and reliable.