With the largest global network of any Indian airline and the most nonstop routes to international destinations, Air India connects 60 million travellers with the places they want to go each year using a fleet of more than 300 aircrafts with an additional 600 on order. It’s my team’s goal to improve each of these journeys by helping Air India become the world’s most technologically advanced airline. In that spirit, we joined forces with Adobe to unify our traveller experiences and make them more seamless — from booking to post-arrival and on to planning for the next trip.

I believe aviation is humankind’s greatest accomplishment. I’ll never forget the exhilaration I felt flying a small aircraft for the first time or when meeting aviation legends like Captain Fred Haise (Apollo 13 command module pilot) and General Chuck Yeager (first human to break the sound barrier). As Air India’s chief digital and technology officer, I get to indulge that passion each day and inspire our digital and marketing team to do the same so that our guests can enjoy their passion for travel.

I take great pride in seeing my team empower Air India’s marketers to work more collaboratively and better serve our customers and in being recognised for our achievements by winning “The Experience Maker of the Year” category at this year’s Adobe Experience Maker Awards. Best of all, we are just getting started!

Transformation without disruptions.

Air India’s transformation from a government-owned legacy airline to a modern private airline has been characterised by industry experts as the “Mount Everest of corporate turnarounds.” To connect with Air India’s customers as part of this transformation, we need to do more than delight them. We must deliver experiences that make them feel supported through every stage of their journey on the digital channels that matter to them. The only way to achieve this is with an integrated and holistic approach to managing our traveller experiences. That’s why my team set out to unify Air India’s online and off-line data with our cross-channel platform data.

Working with Adobe, we enabled Air India’s customer-facing teams to deliver timely and relevant experiences on every channel, at every moment. Integrations between Adobe Experience Cloud applications and our airline technology platforms streamlined our booking, check-in, departure and in-flight experiences for every guest.

For instance, we can now deliver just-in-time notifications and promotions to our customers thanks to the data-driven insights we obtain from Adobe Analytics and Adobe Real-Time CDP. Meanwhile, Adobe Campaign allows us to connect with our audiences via WhatsApp, email, app push notifications and SMS based on activated audiences in our customer data platform.

We’ve also boosted our search performance with Adobe Experience Manager Sites. Within just six months, we created 70 new Air India webpages that now rank in the first page of results delivered by the world’s most queried search engines.

And of course, there is the business value these improvements generated for our organisation. Six months after going live with Adobe, Air India saw a 55% increase in “Flight Booking” and “Manage My Booking” orders across our digital properties — and an impressive 30% boost in revenue. At the operational level, we unlocked new efficiencies in our content and marketing workflows, cutting 60 hours from our campaign development and 35 hours per campaign from our website development processes.

Just as impressively, my team delivered these transformative results in record time, laying down an entirely new digital foundation for Air India in less than two years. That’s incredibly fast for an airline of our size, especially when you consider that we achieved this while improving our standard of service for every Air India passenger throughout our transformation.

“Transforming a business of our scale without affecting customers was like building an aircraft while it’s flying full of passengers and then landing it safely. That’s why our mantra through every stage of the journey was ‘transformation without disruptions.”

Championing change through collaboration.

Air India is seen as an innovation leader in our region and my digital and technology team is the beating heart of those strategies within our organisation. As champions of change, we collaborate and execute groundbreaking projects with our company’s loyalty, ecommerce and growth marketing teams to create a seamless experience across every customer touchpoint.

This past year, we worked with our ecommerce team to deploy dozens of enhancements to the Air India booking flow. We also introduced A/B and multivariant testing to our booking experience, powered by Adobe Target, so that we can continuously refine and optimise these crucial processes. In parallel, we worked with our analytics business unit to create more than 150 dashboards for our airline’s key stakeholders, empowering them to easily track and optimise the performance of their digital marketing campaigns.

What started as a team of two has grown to 850 members, all of whom are committed to strengthening our company’s digital customer experiences. As a sports fan, I’ve always appreciated how a cohesive and congruent team becomes more than the sum of its parts and I’m gratified to see my own team adopting this mentality when collaborating with other Air India stakeholders.

“The more we grow and collaborate and the deeper we dive into Adobe’s capabilities, the stronger we become as a team and the greater our impact on our valued guests and Air India’s business.”

Soaring to success as technology partners.

Reflecting on our transformation so far, I attribute our success to the talented and motivated people who take us closer to our vision each day. Every team member and technology partner shares two traits.

The first is creativity. Even in technical fields, you need creative people to imagine things that don’t exist and make them real, which is the fundamental goal of every transformation project.

The second is a capacity to execute. Once you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, you need the right people, tools and partners to make it happen.

To learn more about Air India’s transformation journey, check out their story on the Adobe Experience Maker Awards site.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3458390t2/?hidetitle=true

This is where many brands struggle. They have a transformation goal but don’t know where to get started or how to break through when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges. Luckily, they don’t have to go it alone. Our experience proves that technology partners such as Adobe have all the cutting-edge solutions that brands need to transform their sales, marketing and digital customer experiences.

In Air India’s case, the ambition of our marketing transformation was enormous, especially given the complexity of our organisation and the challenges we faced in unifying our data across business units. But working with Adobe has made our vision feel viable and realistic every step of the way and the success we have seen since joining forces is a testament to the strength of our partnership.

To learn more about Air India’s transformation journey, check out their story on the Adobe Experience Maker Awards site.

Dr Satya Ramaswamy is on a mission to make Air India the most technologically advanced airline in the world, leading the digital transformation across Air India's digital channels and helping all their departments deploy technologies to delight customers and achieve operational excellence. He led the ground-up digital transformation of Air India after its return to the Tata Group in 2022. He also conceptualised and led the seamless technology merger of Air India and Vistara, the two full-service airlines in the Tata Group, including their loyalty programmes, consumer channels and all enterprise systems.

An entrepreneurial leader who sets a fast pace for his organisation, Dr Satya is passionate about “zero to one” technology journeys. An early adopter of digital, he witnessed the evolution of mobile technologies, cloud, big data analytics, social media and modern AI technologies from their earliest days.

He has over 30 years of software engineering, product management and business leadership experience in India and the United States. Dr Satya has a Ph.D. in distributed computing from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an MBA in finance and marketing from the Kellogg School of Management, Chicago. He has 12 granted US patents to his credit. Dr Satya serves on the Steering Group in the Digital Transformation Advisory Council of the International Air Transport Association.

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