Air India is expanding its use of Salesforce’s Agentforce AI technology across customer service, moving beyond refund processing to automate a wider range of complex passenger requests.
The airline is now deploying the technology across three areas — automated email resolution, passenger name changes and a knowledge assistant for customer service teams. The expansion follows an initial Agentforce deployment for refund processing that cut Air India’s internal refund processing time from approximately 14 days to about four hours. However, this refers only to the airline’s internal processing time and not the time taken for the refund to reach a customer’s bank account.
Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Air India, said, “Our journey with Agentforce is not simply about deploying AI; it is about redefining what is possible in airline customer service. We are moving from AI that assists our teams to AI that can understand, decide and execute within clearly defined guardrails. The impact is visible in faster resolutions, greater consistency and lower customer effort. As we scale these capabilities, our focus remains on using AI to address real customer needs while maintaining the accuracy, governance and human oversight expected from an empathetic global airline.”
Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and CEO, Salesforce – South Asia, said, “The next chapter of customer experience will be defined not simply by how quickly organizations respond, but by how intelligently they can act on behalf of customers. Air India is bringing that future to life at the scale and complexity of global aviation — combining trusted data, AI agents and human judgment to make service more proactive, responsive and effortless.”
Under the latest deployments, Agentforce will handle customer emails that contain multiple requests, including refunds, baggage and loyalty-related issues. It can identify the different requirements, gather and validate information across systems, carry out the necessary actions and generate a single response using an Air India-approved template. For eligible cases, responses are generated only when the system exceeds a 95% confidence threshold, with human oversight where required.
The technology is also being used to automate name corrections, a process that involves multiple eligibility checks and ticketing actions. Agentforce can validate the relevant rules, initiate ticket reissuance and deliver the updated ticket to the customer. Air India said the process has been reduced from approximately three days to 30 minutes.
The third deployment, a “Knowledge Agent”, acts as a real-time assistant for customer service staff, providing access to policies, procedures, fare rules and operational guidance through a conversational interface. It is intended to reduce the time staff spend searching across different information repositories and improve the consistency and speed of responses.
Air India has a digital ecosystem spanning more than 140 enterprise systems and more than 30 AI initiatives underway. It is evaluating these initiatives across four areas: increasing revenue, reducing costs, improving customer experience and enabling capabilities that were previously not possible.