Travel and hospitality

Passenger growth can overwhelm support channels. Air India says it doubled its passenger count after early 2022, and millions of customer queries were raising costs, slowing responses and frustrating customers and staff.

Requests are varied and often touch several systems: Air India's assistant covers more than 1,300 question types, from booking changes to refund requests.

Travel companies take payment cards for bookings, and biometric identification, increasingly discussed for airports, is a high-risk area under the EU AI Act.¹²³⁴

Microsoft places travel under Microsoft for Mobility. Its travel and transportation page centers on connected data, frontline staff, intelligent operations and customer loyalty, and links a reference architecture for airlines and airports. Customer examples on that page include American Airlines (Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure App Service, Azure Data Factory) and Carnival Corporation (Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure DevOps). The page does not specifically address hotels.

Air India built its AI.g assistant with its own developers on Azure OpenAI, now Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, with services such as Azure AI Search, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Database listed in its 2024 story. Microsoft's 2026 story says AI.g handles about 40,000 queries a day and has resolved more than 13 million conversations with a 97 percent success rate, that customers can still choose a human agent, and that Air India is testing agents that complete workflows across systems, such as refunds.

A small hotel group or tour operator can usually rely on the chat features of its booking engine or CRM. Building in-house, as Air India did, makes sense with very high query volumes, an internal development team and APIs into reservation and refund systems.¹²⁵