Anthropic Lands Air India as Flagship Partner in Major India AI Push
Bengaluru, India — Air India has tapped Silicon Valley AI firm Anthropic to accelerate its software development efforts, deploying the company’s Claude Code tool across its engineering teams as part of an ambitious drive to become what the carrier’s technology chief calls a “leading Agentic Airline.”
The partnership was announced Monday as Anthropic formally opened its Bengaluru office — the company’s second outpost in Asia after Tokyo — and unveiled a slate of enterprise, education and agriculture collaborations that underscore India’s rapid emergence as a critical market for generative AI.
Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Air India’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, said the Claude Code platform has fundamentally changed how the airline’s developers work. The tool allows engineering teams to ship custom software faster and at lower cost, he said, reducing the carrier’s dependence on expensive third-party systems by building bespoke solutions tailored to its operational needs. Ramaswamy framed the partnership as central to Air India’s broader technology strategy, noting the airline is actively exploring additional agentic AI capabilities from Anthropic to improve customer satisfaction, drive revenue and cut costs.
A Carrier in the Midst of Reinvention
The AI adoption comes at a particularly consequential moment for Air India. The Tata Group-owned carrier is deep into a sweeping five-year overhaul known as Vihaan.AI, touching everything from fleet composition and cabin interiors to digital infrastructure and route strategy. The airline merged with Vistara in late 2024, creating India’s largest full-service carrier, and has placed orders for 570 new aircraft — one of the biggest fleet commitments in aviation history.
Air India currently operates 189 aircraft and plans to induct 26 more in 2026, including six widebody jets — Boeing 787-9s and Airbus A350-1000s — alongside 20 narrowbody aircraft. A $400 million cabin retrofit program is underway across the legacy fleet, with the airline targeting modern or upgraded interiors on more than 90 percent of domestic flights by year’s end.
The digital side of that transformation has been equally aggressive. Air India eliminated traditional data centers entirely in 2023, shifting to a cloud-first architecture. Its AI-powered customer service agent, known as AI.g, now handles roughly 40,000 queries per day with a 97 percent resolution rate, according to the airline — making it one of the first carriers worldwide to deploy generative AI for customer support at scale. The Centre of Digital Innovation, or CODi, which the airline inaugurated in Kochi, serves as the hub for developing customer-facing technologies and AI-driven decision-making tools.
India: Anthropic’s Second-Largest Market
For Anthropic, the Air India deal is the highest-profile name in a broader Indian market push. The San Francisco-based company said India is now the second-largest market globally for its Claude AI assistant, with run-rate revenue in the country doubling since an initial expansion announcement in October 2025. Nearly half of Claude usage in India involves technical tasks — building applications, modernizing legacy systems and writing production code.
The Bengaluru office, located in Embassy Golf Links Tech Park, will be led by Irina Ghose, Anthropic’s Managing Director for India. Ghose called the country one of the world’s most promising opportunities for responsible AI deployment, pointing to its deep pool of technical talent and established digital infrastructure.
Beyond aviation, Anthropic’s India partnerships span fintech firm CRED, which reported doubled feature delivery speed and improved test coverage; IT services giant Cognizant, which is rolling Claude out to 350,000 employees globally; and payments platform Razorpay, which has integrated the AI across its risk and operations systems. The company has also invested in language capabilities, incorporating training data from 10 major Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi.
What It Means for Aviation
Air India’s embrace of agentic AI tools fits a wider pattern across global aviation, where carriers are increasingly turning to machine learning and generative AI to tackle everything from flight planning and revenue management to maintenance prediction and passenger communications. But the explicit framing — an airline publicly positioning itself as an “Agentic Airline” — is notable. It signals a strategic bet that AI won’t merely optimize existing processes but fundamentally reshape how an airline develops, deploys and maintains the software systems underpinning its operations.
Whether that bet pays off will depend on execution. Air India’s transformation has been slowed by global supply chain constraints; CEO Campbell Wilson acknowledged that the carrier should have received 28 new aircraft by late 2025 but deliveries were limited to “white-tail” planes originally built for other operators. Integrating sophisticated AI tooling into an organization simultaneously absorbing a major airline merger, retrofitting hundreds of aircraft and rebuilding its brand from the ground up is no small task.
Still, the partnership raises an intriguing question for the rest of the industry: if a carrier undergoing one of the most complex turnarounds in modern aviation history is willing to bet on AI-driven development at this scale, how long before the technology becomes table stakes for every airline with ambitions of staying competitive?
Photo Credit: Daniel Eledut
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