Singapore Airlines expands OpenAI use across travel and work

AI-powered customer service and travel discovery

Singapore Airlines moved Kris, its customer-facing chatbot, from a traditional dialog-flow system to a conversational experience powered by the OpenAI API. According to the airline, the change produced a 2x increase in customer satisfaction.

Kris can interpret customer intent in natural language, use a knowledge base to ground its answers, manage conversations covering multiple topics and transfer customers to a representative with relevant context when needed. Customers use it for general queries, special requests, real-time flight disruption information and selected transactional workflows. Singapore Airlines is continuing to expand Kris to support booking changes, baggage transactions and more complex agentic interactions.

The airline has also introduced OpenAI API-powered call summarization and other AI-assisted tools for customer service representatives. Singapore Airlines says these tools have reduced average handling time by approximately 10%, allowing representatives to spend less time on after-call work.

Its Flight Recommender tool lets customers describe the trip they want in natural language rather than repeatedly adjusting filters, dates and destinations. Usage has grown nearly 3x over the past year. The system connects an orchestration layer to fare and availability data, interprets customer intent, calls relevant tools and returns travel recommendations in natural language.

Controls support the airline's AI deployments

Singapore Airlines combines OpenAI models with orchestration, internal data controls, validation and human review across its deployments. For Flight Recommender, the airline says it has added safeguards for input and output validation, malicious or inappropriate queries, hallucination reduction, personally identifiable information handling and authenticated access to only the context required for each query.

The airline is preparing to make Flight Recommender more conversational, so customers can refine travel ideas across multiple turns instead of restarting a search. Singapore Airlines says Kris is also moving toward deeper self-service, with more transactional capabilities available directly in chat.

“AI is central to our efforts to deliver more personalized customer experiences and improve productivity across the business,” George Wang, Senior Vice President Information Technology at Singapore Airlines, said in the company's announcement.

OpenAI models support the software lifecycle

Singapore Airlines is using OpenAI models across selected software development lifecycle activities, rather than limiting their use to code generation. The airline says teams have achieved productivity gains of up to 20% while using AI to refine requirements, analyze stakeholder sessions, develop product specifications, identify edge cases, create test cases, review architecture and break complex work into smaller tasks.

For one commercial feature, the team used the OpenAI API to challenge assumptions, identify ambiguous requirements and surface edge cases before development began. AI then helped turn the clarified requirements into design options, implementation plans, test cases and code generation. During deployment and afterward, it also helps interpret system behavior in production and flag potential issues.

This workflow shifts employees toward directing, reviewing and validating AI-generated work. Singapore Airlines says people can therefore focus on prioritization, architecture, governance and stakeholder outcomes, while AI supports requirements quality, test coverage and conformance with internal standards.

Jarvis brings governed AI to employees

Beyond engineering, Singapore Airlines provides access to OpenAI models through Jarvis, its governed internal AI platform. Employees use Jarvis to summarize documents, work with PDFs, Word documents, Excel files and PowerPoint decks, and create custom workflows and lightweight knowledge bases in a secure environment.

More than 60% of Singapore Airlines employees are using Jarvis monthly, according to the company, with adoption continuing to increase. The airline's broader plan is to make AI available across more day-to-day roles while continuing to expand customer-facing tools. The combination of customer service automation, conversational travel discovery, software development support and an internal platform shows how Singapore Airlines is applying OpenAI technology across both passenger experiences and business operations.