TL;DR:

Gander is using AI to automate customer service for airlines. We are working with our first airline to automate the back-office tasks involved with processing reimbursement claims, while building a voice agent that calls customers to get them on a new flight if they miss their original one.

Gander Demo

Problem

Airline’s are sitting on the biggest customer service problem in the world taking into account complexity, volume, and regulation. In fact, global airlines spend nearly $80 Billion Dollars on customer service every year. When it comes to disruptions (when things go wrong), supporting customers is hard for three reasons:

1. Volume Spikes: Anyone flying during the Crowd-Strike Outage, Southwest’s Christmas Meltdown, or during March 2020 knows this problem deeply. Airline’s can have their claims and support volume increase 100X overnight.

   

2. Regulation: Every country has their own passenger rights laws for what passenger’s are entitled to. Complying with them introduces mistakes, back office over head, and introduces airlines to litigation and liability

   

3. Messy Data: To process a reimbursement claim on behalf of a passenger, the airline has to manually review receipts and flight logs while doing painful verifications in antiquated legacy systems

   

Solution

Gander Forms: Helps Airlines Process Compensation & Reimbursement Claims

• White-labeled AI forms experience or API on top of airline’s existing process
• Gander reimburses passengers for food, transportation, hotel, baggage delay & damage expenses according to airline policy & regulations
• Uses AI to cut agent cost, fraud, in-accurate claims, and protects against lawsuits from EU-261, Brazil ANAC, Canada APPR & more

Gander Voice: Proactive Voice Agent to Change/Move Flights

• GenAI voice agent pro-actively calls customers who have been disrupted to review flight options and answer questions
• Stops customers from calling live agents, creating long airport queues, or using chat resources
• Can be configured to be proactive to certain loyalty populations, disruption types, or switched to reactive

Our Vision

We want to bring LLMs to the 1T airline industry. Industry incumbents take multiple-years to catch up to new technologies - we want to beat them to it. We see customer service as our wedge into becoming a trusted vendor to bring LLMs to the critical workflows it takes to transport people via air. Our founding team experience with this problem space first hand having spent time at United, American, and investing in aviation software at Insight Partners. Here are some examples of expansions for a flight for a delayed flight from New York to London:

• Finding A New Crew: The delay will cause the existing crew to not have enough regulated rest time. Gander can automate the process of calling and texting reserve crew to see if they can report to the airport to service the new flight
• Finance/Accounting: The flight will spin off dozens of invoices from fuel, air navigation service providers, and airport vendors. Gander can ingest these invoices and true them up to the actual services consumed for the flight given its delay (rather than standard rule sets)
• Operations: The new flight time will invalidate the filed routing. Gander can process Route Availability Documents (RADs) to determine what airways and routes will be most efficient to take given the new departure time

Traction

We are launching with our first airline customer in the next 6 weeks and have a robust pipeline of airlines that together fly 100M+ passengers to service afterwards

Asks

• If you know anyone who works in the airline industry in the US or abroad, we would love to chat with them (arjan@usegander.com)!
• If you have any stories (good or bad) interacting with customer support, we want to hear from you as well!