Salesforce, the #1 AI CRM, announced the expansion, which forms part of Air India’s effort to advance its ambition to become an agentic airline of the future. The deployment is designed to enable faster resolutions, simpler customer journeys and smarter service at scale.
The expansion follows Air India’s initial deployment of Agentforce for refund processing, one of the more complex service processes in airline operations because it involves 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 cover three high-impact service processes: Automated Email Resolution, Name Change Automation and a Knowledge Agent for service teams. The deployments are intended to bring greater speed, consistency and intelligence to customer requests that span multiple systems and workflows.
Under Automated Email Resolution, customer emails containing multiple requests across refunds, baggage, loyalty and other service needs can be processed through Agentforce. Such requests previously required service agents to triage, investigate and validate information across systems before responding.
Agentforce identifies multiple intents within a single email, invokes specialised sub-agents, gathers and validates information, executes the required actions and consolidates the outcome into one coherent response generated 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 process is designed to reduce response times, customer back-and-forth and repetitive work for service teams. Over time, the platform uses ambient learning capabilities to generate insights from customer interactions and agent interventions, enabling continuous improvements to prompts, workflows and model performance.
Name Change Automation addresses another complex service process. 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 by 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 the turnaround time for the name-change process from approximately three days to 30 minutes.
The Knowledge Agent serves as an AI-powered representative 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 provide 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. The airline evaluates these initiatives across four strategic pillars: increasing revenue, reducing cost, enhancing customer experience and doing things that were never possible before.
Within that framework, Air India’s 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.
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.”
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises by 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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