As India’s aviation industry is undergoing one of its most ambitious reinventions, Air India’s transformation stands out for its scale, speed, and operational complexity.
In less than three years, the airline has modernised more than 140 enterprise systems, migrated to a 100% cloud-native infrastructure, launched award-winning digital consumer platforms, built one of aviation’s most advanced AI and analytics ecosystems, and executed what many in the industry describe as one of the smoothest airline mergers globally through the integration of Air India and Vistara.
More significantly, much of this transformation was completed in nearly two years—compared to the global airline benchmark of 10+ years for modernisation programs of similar scale.
At the centre of this transformation is Dr Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Air India, who joined the airline in 2022 to rebuild its digital backbone from the ground up.
In this conversation with Express Computer, Ramaswamy discusses why technology is becoming a defining differentiator in global aviation, how Air India is leveraging AI at scale across customer experience and operations, and why the airline believes India’s technology ecosystem can help build one of the world’s most technologically advanced carriers.
Edited excerpts:
You joined Air India at a time when the scale of transformation ahead was enormous. What attracted you to this challenge?
I had previously worked with our Chairman, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, at Tata Consultancy Services, where I built the company’s digital business after TCS acquired my startup.
When Air India returned to the Tata Group, the challenge was fundamentally entrepreneurial. There was practically no modern digital foundation in place, and we had to rebuild the airline almost from scratch.
That mission itself was deeply motivating.
This has honestly been the most meaningful role of my career because we are not simply modernising systems in isolation—we are rebuilding an airline while simultaneously operating one at a global scale.
What gave us confidence was India’s technology advantage. We were able to attract exceptional talent from across the industry and premier institutions like the IITs. Today, our digital and technology organisation has grown to nearly 1,200 people, supported by another 500 professionals from strategic technology partners during peak transformation phases.
Air India’s transformation is often described as one of the fastest in global aviation. What philosophy drove this effort?
Very early on, we recognised that airlines today are fundamentally technology businesses.
Every department—commercial, operations, engineering, crew management, finance, customer experience, HR, safety—depends deeply on technology. Our Chairman was very clear that Air India should aspire to become the most technologically advanced airline in the world.
That became our North Star.
We also believe India gives us a structural advantage because the depth of technology talent available here is unmatched globally. Technology, therefore, had to become a long-term competitive differentiator for Air India.
The scale of the transformation was enormous. We modernised over 140 enterprise systems across the airline ecosystem in nearly two years, whereas such transformations often take over a decade globally.
Today, Air India operates on a 100% cloud-only infrastructure, enabling scalability, resilience, and much faster innovation cycles.
We also completed one of the aviation industry’s fastest SAP S/4HANA implementations in approximately six months.
There is now one area where nobody questions Air India’s global standing anymore—and that is digital capability.
Transforming a running airline is very different from building systems in isolation. How did you ensure business continuity during modernisation?
That was absolutely critical for us. Right at the beginning, we adopted a principle internally: “Transformation without disruption.”
We did not want even a single flight affected because of the technology transformation.
Remember, we were modernising deeply outdated infrastructure. Some of the systems were running on legacy mainframes, out-of-warranty hardware, and extremely old software environments.
For example, our SAP financial systems were operating on extremely old infrastructure when we took over. We migrated those systems to the cloud without losing a single transaction.
Even during the global CrowdStrike incident, not a single Air India flight was disrupted because we had already built resilience into our architecture.
A lot of preparation and calculated risk-taking went into these migrations. In some cases, identical testing hardware no longer existed globally because the systems were that old.
But the larger challenge was time. Customer expectations changed immediately after the Tata acquisition, and people expected a transformation overnight. The only way to respond was by operating with a mission mindset across teams and partners.
Customer-facing digital platforms seem to have become one of the most visible outcomes of this transformation. What guided the redesign of the website and mobile app?
The starting point was empathy for the customer. Our Chairman told me very clearly: first, improve the customer experience because customers need to visibly experience the transformation.
That drove our focus on the consumer channels: website, mobile app, notifications, generative AI chatbot, and in-flight digital experiences.
Today, our apps are rated 4.8 on both Apple and Android app stores—among the highest-rated airline apps globally. We now see over 300,000 daily visitors across direct channels, around 6.5 million digital ticket bookings every month, and nearly 28 million app downloads and 11 million monthly website visits.
The website and app ecosystem and other digital consumer channels have also won global recognitions, including the Red Dot Award, Stevie Award, and Adobe Experience Maker of the Year Award.
But beyond metrics and awards, our philosophy was to simplify stressful travel moments. Flight disruptions often create anxiety because customers lack clarity. That is why notifications became such an important capability for us. Today, Air India sends more than one million proactive notifications daily with a 95.5% delivery rate.
We also introduced capabilities like AI Vision, where customers can scan boarding passes or baggage tags and instantly access contextual services.
Everything was built around reducing friction and making the customer journey more intuitive.
Air India’s GenAI chatbot AI.g has received significant global attention. What makes it different?
AI.g was the global airline industry’s first generative AI chatbot deployed at scale. We started working on it in late 2022 and launched it in May 2023, ahead of most global carriers.
Today, AI.g has answered more than 20 million customer queries, handles nearly 30,000 queries daily across 16,000–18,000 user sessions, resolves about 97% of interactions autonomously, and manages nearly half of our customer support volumes.
What makes it powerful is that it is not just informational—it is transactional.
Customers can modify bookings, process refunds, check baggage allowance, raise baggage claims, complete check-in, access payment receipts, and manage loyalty requests.
Operationally, AI.g has reduced contact-centre load by nearly 50%, allowing customer service teams to focus on more complex and higher-value interactions.
But more importantly, it proved internally that AI can create a measurable business impact. That gave the organisation tremendous confidence to expand AI adoption aggressively.
Air India is now working on dozens of AI initiatives. How are you ensuring AI delivers measurable ROI rather than remaining experimental?
We follow a very outcome-driven approach. At Air India, we identified five key AI value levers:
- reduce customer pain,
- improve customer delight,
- reduce costs,
- increase revenue,
- and enable things that were previously impossible.
That last category is particularly exciting. For example, during the implementation of new FDTL regulations, generative AI helped us validate mappings between DGCA regulations, internal pilot specifications, and software implementations—something that was practically impossible earlier.
AI also generated exhaustive edge-case testing scenarios automatically, helping us ensure smoother rollout compliance.
We are now running more than 30 agentic AI initiatives across customer experience, operations, pricing, revenue management, refunds, and employee productivity as part of our broader vision of building an “Agentic Airline of the Future.”
Importantly, many of these initiatives are delivering ROI within six months.
Data seems to be another foundational pillar of Air India’s transformation. How are you leveraging analytics and personalisation?
When we started, much of the organisation still depended on spreadsheets and fragmented systems. Today, we have built one of the aviation industry’s most advanced enterprise data platforms.
The platform integrates: 45+ enterprise data sources, over 800 TB of curated enterprise data, 1,500+ KPIs, and supports more than 1,000 business users across the organisation.
We also maintain more than 80 million unified customer profiles within our customer data platform.
One of the most impactful use cases is in-flight personalisation. Cabin supervisors receive iPads with contextual customer insights—including loyalty status, past disruptions, and historical experience data.
If a passenger previously experienced disruption, the crew can proactively acknowledge it and personalise service recovery. Internally, we call it “Do This, Say This” guidance.
That data-led personalisation approach has delivered up to a 40-point uplift in NPS during disruption recovery scenarios.
The Air India–Vistara merger was considered remarkably smooth. What role did technology play?
Airline mergers are incredibly difficult globally. In our case, technology became the backbone of the integration strategy.
We integrated more than 140 systems, migrated around 270,000 live reservations, and transferred nearly 9 million loyalty profiles with virtually zero customer disruption.
A huge amount of work went into identity reconciliation, especially around customer profiles and loyalty mapping.
Indian naming conventions are highly variable, so we built intelligent matching systems that could automatically identify the same customer across platforms without asking customers to manually intervene. That significantly simplified the migration experience.
Looking ahead, how do you see AI reshaping the future of aviation?
AI will fundamentally reshape every role inside airlines. Customer experience will become more predictive, contextual, and autonomous. Operations will become increasingly intelligent and real-time. Employees will work alongside AI agents rather than simply using software tools.
Already, Air India’s employee apps record nearly 96% monthly active usage, while around 1.8 lakh crew requests are automated annually through digital systems.
We will continue embedding AI deeper into customer journeys, operations, employee experiences, and enterprise decision-making.
But the larger shift is strategic. Technology is no longer a support function for airlines. It is becoming one of the defining drivers of competitiveness, resilience, operational efficiency, and customer loyalty.
For Air India, the ambition is not merely digital modernisation. The ambition is to build a world-class global airline where technology itself becomes one of the strongest differentiators—and where India’s technology ecosystem becomes a defining advantage on the global aviation stage.