Bristol Airport (BRS) seeks to be at the forefront of innovation in the UK transport sector and saw the opportunity to leverage Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to re-shape the way they interact with customers. By embracing a "tiered self-serve first" approach recommended by Great State (Bristol Airports’ strategic digital agency), they hope to empower passengers to quickly and easily find solutions to their questions. This not only reduces the need for manual intervention by customer service teams but also streamlines operations and minimises wait times.  

In line with this, Bristol Airport launched an AI Assistant in Aug 2024. It provides instant answers around the clock to common questions that airport customers often have.

“Customers to Bristol Airport historically have a lot of questions around areas like parking or security, especially when plans change”, said Richard Thomasson, Head of Customer Operations Bristol Airport. “This is a great opportunity for AI to make a difference - providing real-time information and 24/7 support”.

In some cases, customers may still need to speak with our support team, but we are hoping that our Generative AI Assistant will efficiently answer most questions - leaving more time for us to deal with complex concerns or customers that may need more help.”

‍Why Generative AI? Why Now?

• Consumers have high expectations around digital experiences - and want more than web and social. They expect convenience, hyper-personal, and highly relevant 1-2-1 content.
• Conversational AI & messaging are preferred channels that allow for 24x7 support.
• Consumers have embraced ChatGPT – which uses Generative AI and attracted 100M users within 3 months of launch in 2022.
• Generative AI is a revolutionary technology that creates content like text, audio, images, and even video.  
• Generative AI was pioneered by firms like Open AI & Google; and represents the next wave of personalization and customer experience.

Meet Bristol Airports' AI Assistant

The AI Chatbot can be accessed from the company’s website and provides 24/7 support, rapid response times, and the freedom to ask direct questions. 

• It is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs), and a bespoke Knowledge Base that's built from sources like the Bristol Airport website. 
• The overall architecture is based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) - the most popular way that enterprises are deploying AI.  
• The service was designed from day one to have AI guardrails in place – providing a safe and on-brand experience.
• It uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) - meaning users can type normally - even including typos or emojis - and the Bot will try to provide the best answer in clear, everyday language.  
• The solution includes LLM functionality from Open AI. Orchestration is provided by LangChain - a framework to build with LLMs by chaining interoperable components. 
• AI replies include links to the Bristol Airport website for more information. 
• The solution was delivered from kick-off to launch in around three months, and launched in Aug 2024 on the Bristol Airport website.

“We believe that Conversational AI is one of the key technologies powering and underpinning customer experience improvements for enterprise organisations like Bristol Airport”, said Ravi Lal, Founder, Voxly Digital, “After all, with 24/7 support, rapid response times, and the freedom to ask direct questions at any time, we hope users will favour using the self-service AI Assistant in the years to come”. 

Being the face of customer support means it’s important that we created a solution that understands a wide range of questions in the way real users would ask them. Gone are the days of static bots that don’t always provide what the user is looking for”. 

The AI Assistant is able to answer a large number of questions that airport users regularly in areas like:

• Car Park Booking
• Security at the Airport 
• Lounge Booking
• Lost Property
• Special Assistance
• Airline Info 

Ben Murphy, Client service director from Great State, Bristol Airports' lead digital and strategic agency noted, “At Great State, our central objective is to empower organisations to better understand and deliver the digital experiences their customers expect. We build our technical solutions around organisational strategy, and we’re proud to have delivered this innovation together with Voxly Digital for Bristol Airport and their ten million passengers, marking the first use of Gen AI for customer support among the leading UK airports”.

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Notes: 

1. "First use amoung leading UK airports" based on review of the chatbot and customer contact options offered by the top 10 UK airports (by passenger numbers) in Aug 2024.  

2. Chatbots that use LLMs, natural language processing, natural language generation, Knowledge bases, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation architecture (RAG) are generally considered to be Generative AI Assistants. Older chatbots are button-based, use pre-written replies, and follow scripted decision trees.

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