NewsVoir
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], September 16: Salesforce, the #1 AI CRM*, today announced that Air India is expanding its use of Agentforce across customer service. Deploying AI agents beyond its initial refund-processing use case, the airline is now solving a broader set of complex service workflows. Powered by Agentforce, Air India is reimagining customer service with intelligent, end-to-end experiences that understand customer intent, validate requests, connect intelligently across enterprise systems, and take action in real time. By enabling faster resolutions, effortless customer journeys, and smarter service at scale, Agentforce is helping Air India advance its ambition to become an agentic airline of the future.
This expansion follows Air India’s initial Agentforce deployment for refund processing—one of the more complex service processes in airline operations, involving multiple validations, policy checks, backend-system interactions, and cross-team dependencies. By orchestrating validations, approvals, and backend refund processing activities, Agentforce has helped reduce Air India's internal refund processing time from approximately 14 days to about 4 hours. Bank processing time remains unchanged.
The latest deployments focus on three high-impact service processes, bringing greater speed, consistency and intelligence to complex customer requests that span multiple systems and workflows: Automated Email Resolution, Name Change Automation and a Knowledge Agent for service teams.
Automated Email Resolution: Customer emails can contain multiple requests — spanning refunds, baggage, loyalty, and other service needs — requiring agents to triage, investigate, and validate information across systems before responding. Agentforce identifies multiple intents within a single email, invokes specialized sub-agents, gathers and validates information, executes required actions, and consolidates the outcome into one coherent response generated in Air India approved template. For eligible cases, responses are generated only when the system exceeds a 95% confidence threshold, with human oversight where required. This helps reduce response times, customer back-and-forth and repetitive work for service teams. Over time, the platform leverages ambient learning capabilities to generate insights from customer interactions and agent interventions, to continuously improve prompts, workflows, and model performance.
Name Change Automation: Name corrections require multiple eligibility checks, validations, and ticketing actions, making them particularly challenging when travel is imminent. Agentforce orchestrates the process end-to-end — validating multiple eligibility rule combinations, completing various workflow callouts, initiating ticket reissuance, and delivering the updated ticket to the customer. With Agentforce, Air India has reduced turnaround time for the process from approximately three days to 30 minutes.
Knowledge Agent: The AI-powered representative acts as a real-time assistant for customer service teams, providing instant access to policies, procedures, fare rules, and operational guidance through a conversational interface. By eliminating the need to navigate multiple knowledge repositories, the solution significantly reduces information retrieval time and agent hold times during live customer interactions. The deployment has improved response consistency, accelerated agent onboarding, enhanced first-contact resolution rates, and enabled service teams to deliver faster, more accurate, and more confident customer support at scale.
Air India has built a cloud-first digital ecosystem spanning more than 140 enterprise systems and has more than 30 agentic AI initiatives underway. It evaluates those initiatives across four strategic pillars: increasing revenue, reducing cost, enhancing customer experience, and doing things that were never possible before. Within that framework, its work with Salesforce has progressed from building a unified customer data and engagement foundation, to redesigning service processes and agent workflows, and now to executing increasingly complex workflows autonomously. As Air India continues to scale, this foundation will support more intelligent, responsive, and personalized customer service across its operations.
Comments on the news:
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. We are proud to partner with Air India as it reimagines customer service for the agentic era and advances its ambition to become an Agentic Airline of the future.”
About Salesforce
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation. Visit www.salesforce.com/in/ for more information.
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Air India Accelerates Customer Service Transformation with Salesforce Agentforce
