Qatar Airways Readies Gen AI Agent Sama to Help Book Travel

Qatar Airways is giving its digital cabin crew, Sama, a generative artificial intelligence makeover to improve its customer service experience and ultimately drive sales.

Sama 2.0 is a more humanlike AI digital entity, complete with expressions and simulated breathing. This is a departure from her former gamelike character appearance and signals a shift in Qatar Airways’ approach to passenger interaction.

In its next phase, Sama will be able to book flights and complete transactions on behalf of people, pivoting to agent AI—the industry’s next AI evolution, the company said.

Sama 2.0 is found on Qatar Airways’ metaverse experience, QVerse, where people can chat or talk to the AI, asking questions about on-ground and on-board services such as cabin preferences, meal options or baggage allowance, and ultimately book flights.

“AI essentially gives us capabilities to enhance our QVerse space into a two-way engagement platform,” said Babar Rahman, vice president of marketing at Qatar Airways.

Brands are moving beyond the traditional, scripted chatbot experience with the explosion of gen AI, and customer experience is a clear use case. Kitchen appliance brand Lēvo is boosting sales by ingesting gen AI into its chatbot. And according to Gartner, 80% of customer service and support organizations are expected to apply gen AI in some form to improve agent productivity and customer experience by 2025.

“Qatar Airways’ deployment of Sama 2.0 highlights a crucial evolution in AI-powered customer experiences,” said Jason Snyder, chief technology officer of IPG agency Momentum Worldwide. “Empathy is the next frontier in transformative customer experiences. While challenges exist, the potential to create profoundly personalized and emotionally resonant brand interactions through AI is undeniable.”

Sama 2.0 is powered by Synanim, UneeQ’s real-time, life-like animation technology. The brand said Sama comes with her own backstory, including her childhood in Doha and training as a flight attendant for Qatar Airways.

Nuanced, contextual conversations

Sama, meaning sky in Arabic, is trained on Qatar Airways’ extensive data sets, such as past interactions with customers, and it is trained to follow brand guidelines to ensure topical relevance to queries, said Danny Tomsett, CEO of UneeQ. Tomsett didn’t share the large-language-model specifics.

Previously limited in her conversational capabilities, Sama struggled to understand nuanced queries beyond generic terms. For example, Sama could pick terms such as dog in queries related to dog travel but missed understanding specifics like Labrador.

However, thanks to gen AI, Sama 2.0 offers a richer and more contextual conversation within QVerse, said Tomsett.

“There are many clear benefits to using photorealistic humanlike chatbots with open-ended conversational abilities in customer service, but their prospects for widespread acceptance are still uncertain,” Gartner vp distinguished analyst Andrew Frank told ADWEEK. “While they can seem expressive, they fall just short of passing for real humans, which can be unsettling. As they become increasingly indistinguishable, there will be some alarming implications. So I think it’s an area where a great deal of transparency and caution is needed.”

Sama 2.0 is initially available in English, but it will soon be able to talk in 12 languages, including Arabic. If unable to answer people’s queries, Sama suggests that customers speak to a human agent.

Metaverse boosts return on ad spend

Launched in April 2022, QVerse is accessible to anyone, letting them sample their in-flight experiences through the live platform before they make the purchase. Since its launch, the airline operator has seen a 1,000% return on ad spend and over 200% product return on investment, according to Rahman.

“In addition, we have seen that more than one-half of the customers on the platform are first-time bookers,” he said. “With a try-before-you-fly experience, implementing AI in our QVerse space gives us that opportunity to have users interact with our product and service, and specifically experience the hospitality they can expect when they fly with us.”