How AI crushes aviation's crises and creates the ultimate superagents.

Both since and during the pandemic, the travel industry has struggled to attract, recruit, and retain talent, with experienced agents moving to new industries. For airlines, this is more than an inconvenience. It’s a matter of existential importance. Sourcing - and training and developing agents across the diverse soft and hard skills required - is crucial for companies to operate.

This is where generative AI immediately removes a core barrier to talent acquisition, expanding the candidate pool exponentially by providing a powerful solution: instant, accurate language translation. This not only alleviates an industrywide HR crisis - it fosters customer success in sensitive moments. Consider:

• The comfort factor: Many people whose native language is not English can feel uncomfortable when they are forced to speak it, particularly in emergency or crisis situations when they experience high levels of anxiety. Instant translation removes an added layer of panic from already challenging situations while enabling airlines to assign the most skilled agent to a customer’s case regardless of linguistic limitations. 
• Universal understanding: By automatically translating their conversations in voice and/or chat, airlines can create a clear, communicative environment that puts all customers equally at ease regardless of their origins or language skills - a must-have for an intrinsically diverse industry. 
• Superagent efficiency: Generative AI not only powers Automated Translation, enabling each live agent to communicate in over 99 languages. It also supports AI Voice and Text Bots that boost efficiency with instant, universally understandable responses. This integration frees agents from first-level helpdesk questions, allowing them to focus on second-level support.

Overall, these LLM-based tools give airlines the opportunity to hire the best support the globe has to offer, focusing on critical aptitudes like people skills and problem-solving, to train them rapidly and realistically with interactive simulation-based Agent Development Accelerators, and to preserve time and effort for the most pressing and complex cases. All this and more without a single customer lost in translation. But there’s another name in the game when it comes to AI-powered tools: agentic. What’s the difference - and what promise does it hold for aviation?

Aviation’s major players confirm that we are already looking beyond generative applications, like translation, toward incorporating agentic AI. Unlike response-generating tools, these specialised models operate as collaborative agents, taking tech-powered customer support to the next level.

It’s not a matter of replacing human agents, however - or even the genAI suite that empowers them. Aviation’s agentic AI copilots are best employed as part of a multi-layered system. Consider how each element works in unison to create truly robust crisis management. For instance, during a massive weather-related delay:

1. The genAI language tool: instantly translates the traveller's urgent chat message from Japanese to English and translates the agent’s response back, ensuring crystal-clear, empathetic communication in real time.
2. The AI context agent: scrapes vast amounts of traveller-focused data, including the individual's tastes, current travel plans, historical trip data, and even comments from travel reviews of their destination to support a precise, tailored approach.
3. The AI operational agent: consolidates information across different systems (like pricing, inventory, and hotel availability), automatically extracting and unifies helpdesk solutions.
4. The AI reporting agent: automatically generates reports on KPIs, identifies root causes of issues, and provides actionable instructions for the human agent to follow up on.
5. The human expert: handles any unresolved or escalated matters, combining this wealth of accurate, personalised insights with unmatched empathy, transforming interactions into positive experiences that build bonds of loyalty between airlines and travellers. 

That’s how generative and agentic AI empower your operations team to excel at scale. An integrated approach not only streamlines every aspect of aviation operations and CX. It also enables ongoing optimisation, consolidating different information systems in one central location for easy collaboration and reporting - a recipe for maintaining a competitive edge through innovation and growth.

Generative AI, agentic AI, and human talent: by combining these into a “copilot" environment, aviation CX experts are not only solving a language problem; we are creating truly brilliant and resilient systems that resolve multiple industry crises simultaneously. While genAI breaks the language barrier and alleviates the talent shortage, agentic AI transforms human agents into ultimate superagents that secure exceptional traveller experiences even in the most turbulent times. 

Ready to lead on efficiency, scale, and loyalty in aviation’s ambitious new era? Contact us to find out more about how partnering with Transcom gives you the edge.