Air India has rolled out an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven feature, eZ Booking, whereby customers can complete their reservation on its website in fewer steps than currently available by just texting or talking to the AI Agent about his detailed travel itinerary. Currently available exclusively for members of Maharaja Club, Air India’s loyalty programme, the innovation helps customers book their tickets on the Air India website, airindia.com, by eliminating several commands and without having to navigate multiple screens. eZ Booking is another step in Air India’s endeavour to give its customers an enhanced and seamless experience.
eZ Booking is powered by intelligent ‘Agentic AI’ tools and simulates the role of a travel agent by listening to the customer’s requirements and generating a customised itinerary. ‘Agentic AI’ helps users complete complex tasks with minimal human intervention utilising machine learning, natural language processing, and automation technologies to take decisive action. The reservation journey on digital channels for airline customers involves navigation through multiple screens to enter travel details, make selections from available choices, feed in information about travellers, etc. before making the payment and getting the ticket. eZ Booking aims to streamline the process to fewer clicks and pages by eliminating multi-step navigation on the website.
“In our pursuit of developing technologies to elevate customer experience and provide them with a seamless and intelligent digital interface, we have introduced eZ Booking on our website, initially for our loyalty programme members. This is an industry-leading initiative, and we are taking early steps in deploying the emerging ‘Agentic AI’ capabilities across our digital footprint. We hope our guests will enjoy the ease-of-use, speed, and convenience of eZ Booking, which further enriches our strong digital channel presence,” said Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India.
Air India’s pioneering experience using the latest artificial intelligence technologies helps the airline offer a smooth reservations journey, making eZ Booking customer-friendly. The patent-pending design concept for eZ Booking recently won the ‘Red Dot Design Concepts’ award, which is showcased in the Red Dot Design Museum in Singapore. eZ Booking further enhances the experience for Air India’s online customers by leveraging learnings from Air India’s innovative AI-driven chatbot ‘AI.g’, launched in May 2023. The global airline industry’s first generative AI chatbot, the AI.g, has responded to over 7 million guest queries so far, answering 50,000 queries per day across multiple issues. It answers an impressive 97% of queries autonomously, with just 3% of the queries escalated to human agents.
Guests can find the eZ Booking feature on the top navigation bar once they log into the Maharaja Club website at www.airindia.com. Air India plans to launch the eZ Booking feature on its mobile website and mobile app in the coming weeks.