Air India's Expanded Use of Salesforce AI Cuts Refund Waits From Two Weeks to Hours

Air India is expanding its use of Salesforce's artificial intelligence tools across customer-facing operations, reporting significant speed gains in two processes that have historically frustrated passengers. According to Salesforce, the airline has cut refund processing time to roughly four hours, down from about 14 days previously, while passenger name-change requests — a common source of delay when travelers need to correct booking details — now take around 30 minutes instead of three days. The improvements point to AI being used to automate case handling and decisioning that previously required manual review by customer service staff, rather than simply adding a chatbot layer on top of existing processes. For an airline the size of Air India, shortening these two workflows alone stands to meaningfully reduce the volume of support tickets and complaints tied to slow refunds and correction requests, a persistent pain point across the industry as carriers have scaled up digital self-service without always matching it with faster backend processing. The move fits a broader pattern of airlines turning to AI platforms from major enterprise vendors like Salesforce to handle high-volume, rules-based customer service tasks, freeing human agents for more complex cases.