Air New Zealand announced its partnership with OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, marking the first collaboration of its kind in Aotearoa.
This initiative seeks to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the airline’s operations, driving new levels of efficiency and improving customer experiences across all touchpoints.
Through this collaboration, Air New Zealand will have direct access to OpenAI’s technology to design and deploy practical AI applications while also providing secure, enterprise-level AI tools to its corporate staff.
“Early areas of exploration include improving customer self-service experiences and enabling safe, responsible integrated planning across airline maintenance and operations. Air New Zealand is also looking into how data-driven insights can help employees make smarter, more informed operational decisions,” Air New Zealand said in a press release.
The agreement gives Companion AI—Air New Zealand’s deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise—to all 3,500 corporate team members across the airline. Additionally, Air New Zealand will also invest in developing innovative new solutions using OpenAI APIs to enhance both customer and employee experiences with generative AI.
Air New Zealand’s Chief Digital Officer, Nikhil Ravishankar said the partnership has allowed the airline to rapidly deploy companion AI tools to its corporate employees.
“So we already have about 1500, what we call, custom GPTs in the organisation. Think of them as sort of rudimentary agents, and what the OpenAI partnership allows us to do is work with their engineering teams and product teams to develop these solutions to solve airline problems, not just for Air New Zealand.”
“We’re hoping that the solutions are also applicable around the world.”
Custom GPTs in ChatGPT empower developers, teams, or businesses to build personalised AI assistants from GPT models. Users can set the AI’s personality and tone, incorporate specialised knowledge, and connect proprietary data or workflows, enabling the creation of custom AI solutions for specific industries, business requirements, or creative projects, all without needing advanced coding skills.
Ravishankar added that the collaboration allows Air New Zealand to act as a proving ground for OpenAI’s new technologies.
“So we get first access, early access to some of these tools as they emerge, and some of these tools are turning up on almost a weekly basis,” he said.
“Almost every aspect of the customer’s experience with the airline will be impacted by AI and this partnership going forward.”