AI Enabled Airline Cabin Services: AI Augmented Services for Emotional Values. Service Design for High‐Touch Solutions and Service Quality

Abstract This paper highlights the significance of emotional values within digital services during the airline cabin experience. Currently, emotional engagement with front‐line AI interactions, such as AI assistants, lacks trust. Thus, the role of AI must be reimagined to better integrate the human factor into the service experience through things like high‐touch in order to create trust and improve the perception of cabin service quality. Service design is a human‐centric approach to service creation in which the user is typically made the main subject of the service research; the service process (service interaction) then co‐creates values alongside the service provider. The major concept discussed here is AI Augmented Services (AIAS), which turn high‐tech capabilities into high‐touch “human centric” services that can offer access, control, and well‐being to the user, all of which are key components in the establishment of trust. Airline future services can then implement this study for the purpose of detecting human emotions, co‐creating emotional values, and promoting emotional intelligence through the AIAS interactive communication channels, thereby transforming high‐tech capabilities into high‐touch opportunities. The methodological approach began by determining a benchmark for the state‐of‐the‐art AI technology in transport and conducting a set of expert interviews. Notably, the possible materialisation and challenges of AIAS high‐touch cabin services are also discussed here. This article can be considered to be a first step toward a service design in which opportunities are discussed with the goal of “discovering” possible AI solutions. Consecutive stages will be presented in future articles in which the concepts introduced here will be further defined and developed.