Cathay says it is enhancing its customers’ digital experience with the launch of an advanced conversational artificial intelligence (AI). The move is part of the Hong Kong-based airline’s “purpose to move people forward in life,” says the company, adding that is continuously pursuing the development of new technologies that enable it to give customers more choice and control over their journeys, whether on the ground, in the air or on digital channels.
That, according to Cathay, has included the introduction of AI chatbots in recent years that enable passengers and cargo customers to receive immediate responses to their queries, ranging from checking flight status, to booking changes and online shopping.
Now, under the airline’s conversational AI roadmap, Cathay says it is optimising its digital customer experience even further with the most cutting-edge language AI technologies, designed to improve the efficiency and productivity of the airline’s AI chatbots, enabling them to provide more accurate responses to customers’ queries.
As demand for travel returns, Cathay says it is anticipating an increase in the volume of call and chat traffic, with post-Covid travel enquiries already growing rapidly in the past few months. The airline says has also seen a shift in customer behaviours, turning from traditional hotlines to digital channels such as WhatsApp and WeChat for more instant responses.
Digital channel usage has experienced monthly growth of 10-20% over recent months, says Cathay, as it continues to add back more flight capacity.
To build an AI chatbot that provides a superior digital experience for customers, the airline says the most important yet challenging task is to find large volumes of high-quality data to train the chatbot so that it can understand what people are asking, and why, to provide proper responses.
Such chatbot training is often time consuming and expensive, requiring human “AI Trainers” to look at historical data to see how customers interacted with the chatbot, manually extract, clean, and annotate useful portions of this historical data, and then feed it back into the chatbot for learning.
To address these challenges, Cathay and partner Fano Labs have developed and launched the Conversational AI Training Excellence platform, which uses AI technologies to train AI chatbots by analysing interactions with customers, including voice calls, live chats, WeChat messages, and WhatsApp messages, and then automatically grouping the data into different categories for further processing, before presenting the results to a human supervisor for review and approval. The AI chatbot then learns from the data extracted by the trainer “AI.”
With this system in place, Cathay expects to reduce the time needed to train chatbots by 50%, meaning a regular 4-6 week learning cycle will be shortened to 1-2 weeks only. The solution will enable Cathay to take on a significantly greater volume of training data and ramp up its ability to discover new topics and improve the accuracy of chatbot responses.