Air India Removes Data Silos, Embraces AI | Digital Transformation

New Delhi, Sep 30 (PTI) Air India has created a data infrastructure without any data silos, providing it a huge competitive advantage, a senior official said on Monday and also emphasised that the airline will be an artificial intelligence-infused company.

Loss-making Air India was acquired by the Tata Group from the government in January 2022 and since then, the airline group has embarked on a transformation path.

The group airlines AIX Connect is getting merged with Air India Express while Vistara will be merged with Air India.

Air India's Chief Digital & Technology Officer Satya Ramaswamy on Monday said Vistara is a great company and it is bringing a lot to the table in the combined airline.

"We have worked very closely with the Vistara technology team and about 140 systems were mapped... overall, the merger is going very well," he said.

Vistara, a joint venture between Tatas and Singapore Airlines, is to merge with Air India in November.

According to Ramaswamy, Vistara customers and employees are in for a huge digital upgrade with the merger with Air India.

At the CAPA India Digital Aviation Summit in the national capital, Ramaswamy talked about various aspects of the digital transformation at Air India.

"One of the first things we did was we removed all the data silos in the organisation. We could create a data infrastructure without any silo.

"That is giving us a huge competitive advantage on the global stage today because we can correlate data across multiple departments," he said.

Ramaswamy also said Air India will be an "AI-infused company".

Among other initiatives, Air India's generative AI virtual agent 'AI.g' handles around 30,000 queries a day and a containment ratio of 97 per cent, which means that 97 per cent of the customer queries are handled by it without being escalated to a human agent.

Further, he said culture as well as communications and data are important for the transformation.

"We want to be a data transparent and data-driven organisation," he added.

To a query on whether Air India was the most complex digital transformation project, Ramaswamy said, "absolutely without any doubt...".