Air India develops 30+ in-house AI tools and plans to save around Rs 100 crore annually

Air India plans to save around Rs 100 crore annually by using AI extensively, said Satya Ramaswamy, chief digital and technology officer. The airline has developed more than 30 AI tools in-house, ranging from simple use cases like handling customer complaints to more complex applications like predictive decision making for the maintenance of its 300-aircraft fleet. Saving costs is critical for Air India, which has more than Rs 26,000 crore in accumulated losses as of FY26. Ramaswamy, who earlier headed data at Tata Consultancy Services, was handpicked by Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran to overhaul Air India's digital backbone, which was non-existent under the carrier's erstwhile government ownership. Generative AI developed by Microsoft, Anthropic or Salesforce is helping the carrier communicate with passengers better, according to Ramaswamy. The airline's chat bot can read through customer emails and booking tickets and take logical decisions such as whether to issue a refund or not. This has resulted in a 50% reduction in call volumes at its call centre. "Air India is the first airline worldwide to deploy generative AI for customer service at scale," said Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft. Air India is also using an in-house developed AI tool to unlock operating patterns on a real-time basis. By the time a trend starts to evolve, the software has already flagged it, allowing its Mascot team to be proactive rather than reactive. "The on-time performance tool we developed essentially is a capability that anybody in the system can use to understand it on many different levels," Ramaswamy said. "Like if there is an issue with on-time performance of a particular station, we will be able to immediately understand what exactly went wrong and get a fix." A duty allocation system is still in development. "We are developing a system which can allocate tasks more efficiently. Then we wouldn’t need to hire as many people as we increase our scale by 100 or 200 aircraft more," Ramaswamy said.