Lufthansa to Partner with IBM Watson to Improve Customer Service

Munich Airport

Lufthansa Group and IBM announced the creation of the Lufthansa AI Studio.

The Lufthansa AI Studio will use artificial intelligence to address the airline’s business challenges such as how to improve customer service.

The first project of the Lufthansa AI Studio will be to integrate IBM Watson solutions such as Watson Conversation and Watson Natural Language Understanding into the airline’s Service Help Centre, where 22 employees support 15,000 Lufthansa agents in answering questions about check-in and boarding.  The solution, which has been trained to understand aviation industry-specific terminology, will allow employees to pose questions in natural language and receive faster responses.

“Airlines, like Lufthansa, are applying AI to sift through vast amounts of customer data to solve problems and more quickly respond to their passengers’ needs,” said Dee Waddell, IBM’s global managing director for travel and transportation.

Additional projects will include modernizing processes at the airline as well as the transformation of existing workflows.  One example is to integrate various sources of customer feedback, analyze them, and make them available using natural language processing and sentiment analysis. Another example is using Watson to assist in sentiment analysis of social-media messages received by the airline.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)