MC EXCLUSIVE How ixigo's decade-old AI bet paid off during Indigo crisis

Aloke Bajpai Chairman, Managing Director & Group Chief Executive Officer and Rajnish Kumar Director & Group Co-Chief Executive Officer.

• ixigo's AI managed 3.81M customer queries in Q3 FY26, helping in times of crises.
• During IndiGo's December crisis, AI managed 90% of calls and sped up refunds
• AI helped ixigo cut costs and maintain quick customer support response times.

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Long before Artificial Intelligence (AI) became the buzzword, two IITians were already using it to fix everyday travel headaches.

What began as a tech experiment by Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, both from IIT Kanpur, later became ixigo’s biggest edge, especially when the Indian travel industry hit one of its toughest moments during the IndiGo crisis.

"We have been building AI products for 10 plus years," Aloke Bajpai, Chairman, Managing Director & Group Chief Executive Officer (CEO), ixigo, told Moneycontrol on January 22, while he spoke about how their AI agent TARA and Flight Tracker Pro came in handy to all customers during the flight disruptions.

AI to the rescue

About 3.81 million customer queries for Q3 FY26 were handled by AI across chat and voice, out of which just during the impacted period, 150,000 calls were handled through AI when the disruption was peaking between December 1-9.

In the December quarter, over 76 percent of voice calls were handled end-to-end by AI, while in December, when the crisis unfolded, proactive voice calling was stepped up, with AI handling 90 percent of all calls in December.

"What really changed the game for us during the Indigo crisis or when the cancellations and reschedules were happening was that we proactively deployed AI voice calling to inform customers and also give them status on their refunds because the issue was that people didn't even know the fate of their flights," he said.

The surge in customer support reach-outs during the IndiGo crisis was two times higher while the use of Flight Tracker Pro increased 5 times.

During the first half of December 2025, around 4,500 flights got cancelled/ rescheduled over a twelve-day period. The impact had peaked between December 3 and 8.

"As soon as the situation escalated, we set up a dedicated cross-functional war room to manage an environment that was evolving on a daily basis...refunding not only the full ticket amount but also the convenience fees and ixigo Assured fees on the affected bookings that were cancelled between 3rd and 8th December," he added.

However, the move did affect the company's bottomline to some extent. IndiGo's December flight crisis led to a Rs 2 crore impact on ixigo's Q3 FY26 (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) EBITDA.

Saurabh Devendra Singh, Group Chief Financial Officer also estimates about 4-5 percent opportunity loss of domestic flight segments for the industry due to the crisis, "which would have proportionately affected us during the reported quarter."

AI play

Rajnish Kumar, Director & Group Co-CEO on the other hand said that the episode underscored the importance of their investments in an AI-led customer experience stack and utility-driven product innovations.

Bajpai recalled how via their customer experience stack they had called up all the impacted customers through AI and informed them much ahead of even receiving information at times from airlines or any other travel platform. "Also, airport and airline staff were using Flight Tracker Pro at that time to tell each other what the actual status was."

Even during Operation Sindoor when there were airspace closures that were changing every day, there was a lot of flux. "We had proactively informed all the customers which would be impacted, before they would even reach out to us."

Cost of human intervention

Despite customer contact volumes across voice and chat more than doubled during the IndiGo crisis, Kumar noted that resolution times remained steady. "Calls answered within 2 minutes remained at 96.7 percent despite the elevated volumes and average refund time remained 3 hours and 10 minutes."

Over the years, query volumes have grown significantly but AI's use has helped in controlling cost by limiting human intervention.

"The whole of last fiscal year, there were 5 million queries being solved by AI. The year before that was 2.8 million. And now in one quarter, we are already at 3.8 million. If we didn't have AI, we would need to hire a bigger customer support team and that would eat into our operating leverage. We have not done that and we have chosen to invest in AI."

He added that they have products like Travel Guarantee, where it predicts whether a waitlist ticket on a train will get confirmed or not, and if the prediction probability is above a certain level, they give the customer 3 times back if the ticket isn't confirmed. "We would lose money on such products if it were not for the data science and AI that drives it."

Bajpai also said that AI is available 24/7 and it's also able to solve things faster than a human in most times, because it doesn't have to read up a script to understand how to respond to the customer. "In cases where the pre-training data is good, and AI already knows how to solve the problem, it will solve it faster and better than a human."

Future ready

ixigo is now building a new stack of what an AI-first Online Travel Aggregator (OTA) looks like in the future.

Bajpai quipped, "Instead of a startup coming and disrupting us, can we disrupt ourselves?"

The current phase of the AI cycle offers early access to exceptional founders, talent, and platforms, which we believe is a durable strategic advantage, Kumar said.

"We intend to make a small number of focused, high-conviction investments or partnerships in the short to medium term where there is strong alignment with ixigo’s core travel ecosystem, data strengths, and distribution."

He added that it is a once-in-a-lifetime technology transition with AI, even bigger than the emergence of the internet or smartphones.

"What makes this moment particularly important is that AI has now clearly moved beyond experimentation and is entering a phase of real product-market fit across agentic workflows, core infrastructure, and applied vertical use cases, including travel," he said.