Malaysia’s AirAsia Group is accelerating its ongoing digital transformation journey further by implementing robotic process automation (RPA) in collaboration with Silicon Valley and India-based enterprise automation platform JIFFY.ai.

Chief Transformation Officer Azli Mohamed said the implementation of RPA followed a review of AirAsia's internal processes and workflows, which showed that business process automation can be done easily with the right tools in place.

"At AirAsia, we continuously seek to push the boundaries of innovation. RPA will allow our workforce to automate mundane and repetitive tasks, which will free up valuable time to focus on other tasks that require thinking and experience-based judgment.

"RPA will enable us to increase productivity, reduce errors and redeploy resources to higher-value functions. All these benefits will ultimately translate into sizeable cost savings and top-line revenue growth."

AirAsia has appointed India and US- based JIFFY.ai to initiate its RPA adoption, which began in May 2020. The implementation leverages JIFFY.ai's artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled automation platform, which brings intelligent automation, intelligent document processing and analytics together in a single solution.

The RPA adoption within AirAsia Group is led by select internal functions and departments in stages and will include innovative use cases to boost existing revenue optimization. Business process automation represents the next step forward in AirAsia Group's ongoing digital transformation process across the organization, which has been ongoing since 2016.

Pioneering RPA projects are identified through AirAsia Group's CEKAP framework, which is designed to facilitate innovation and promote efficiency internally. Among departments identified to-date include AirAsia Global Shared Services, which expects to achieve significant cost savings and efficiency gains within 180 days of RPA adoption.

The latest key milestones in the digital transformation journey so far include the implementation of end-to-end contactless procedures in May 2020 to facilitate essential travel. These procedures include contactless payment kiosks, enhanced features on the AirAsia mobile app and contactless kiosks in all operating airports across Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and Japan.

With the contactless kiosks, guests making their essential travel can print their boarding pass and baggage tag after checking-in online on airasia.com or through the mobile app, ensuring a full contactless check-in process. The enhanced AirAsia mobile app enables travellers to scan their passports via the app itself, further facilitating a contactless check-in process with more features to be progressively added moving forward.

JIFFY.ai is an RPA platform that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to help companies in automating tasks and processes, thus making operations more time and cost-efficient.

JIFFY.ai has development centers in Silicon Valley, Thiruvananthapuram, Bangalore and Kochi. JIFFY.ai's Thiruvananthapuram centre is a Centre of Excellence in cutting edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.