At the ET Edge CIO&Leader Annual Conference, Rajesh Dogra shared how modernising over a hundred core systems is laying the foundation for AI to genuinely improve the customer journey.
Rajesh Dogra, Chief Customer Experience Officer at Air India, opened by tracing a common thread through his career: technology transformation is ultimately about improving experiences, with the customer at the centre. He pointed to his earlier work on Passport Seva, a citizen-facing platform where speed, trust, data integrity, and seamless stakeholder collaboration were critical to success. As he put it, “it was important for the government to build something that will survive over a period of time,” and he credited the programme’s execution partners for helping citizens get a faster, more trustworthy experience — a system that, in his words, made “government work.”
Joining Air India at an inflection point
Dogra then turned to his own journey into aviation, sharing that when the Tata Group acquired Air India, the chairman asked him to take on a new role, one that has now spanned nearly four and a half years of what he called “a very interesting and challenging journey.” He was candid about the starting point: airlines were becoming more digital, but the underlying architecture needed to support that shift simply wasn’t there. Investments that should have been made earlier hadn’t been, leaving the organisation with real limitations to overcome.
Modernising the foundation, System by System
The scale of the rebuild, Dogra said, has been substantial — Air India has changed 140 core systems over the last four years, with many of them focused directly on customers. He framed this not as a technology upgrade for its own sake, but as reimagining the underlying digital architecture to create a foundation capable of supporting the expectations of a modern digital traveller.
AI as part of a larger strategy, not a standalone tool
Dogra was clear that AI’s role only makes sense within this broader context. “AI is becoming an important part of that evolution,” he said, “but its true value emerges when it is built on trusted data and integrated into a broader transformation strategy that elevates customer experience, strengthens operational efficiency, and builds lasting trust.” He pushed the audience to think beyond typical, narrow applications of AI, urging leaders to look at the entire customer landscape rather than isolated use cases.
Trust as the real deliverable
Across both the Passport Seva experience and Air India’s ongoing transformation, Dogra’s central message stayed consistent: lasting technology change depends on trusted data, strong governance, and workflows built around real stakeholders — not the technology alone. As he summed it up, “the future belongs to organisations that view AI not as an isolated capability, but as part of a larger effort to reimagine every aspect of the customer journey.”