The Alpitour Group , the well-known tour operator, has announced its digital transformation with the aim of offering its customers more effective digital solutions, able to propose personalized experiences. Supporting it in this transition will be IBM, which will make its technologies available, in particular Red Hat OpenShift to quickly build and deploy applications and IBM Watson to give greater value to the customer experience .

IBM’s AI at the service of travelers

IBM will support Alpitour by providing the services of Watson , including Natural Language Understanding and Discovery , to offer a better service to customers: the emails received from Alpitour agencies will be analyzed by IBM’s artificial intelligence to identify key information, classify them and thus offer agency operators all the information necessary to respond quickly and effectively. A system that will allow to automate approximately 80% of Alpitour’s internal processes, allowing c to concentrate on the most important operations.

Considering that the Alpitour manage about 2 million e-mails every year , it was necessary to update the IT architecture , which thanks to the support of IBM has moved from the previous on-premise environment to a hybrid one, integrated with the cloud, in order to better exploit Watson’s services. We chose an open model based on the Kubernetes Red Hat OpenShift platform that allows you to quickly build applications that can run anywhere: on-premise, on private and public clouds from different vendors. The Red Hat environment is based on the Alpitour infrastructure managed by IBM Services at its Italian datacenters and, thanks to it, the applications are able to automatically scale according to the load, avoiding downtime thanks to the ability to automatically detect, and in some cases resolve anomalies without human intervention.

“ The organized tourism sector has been going through a new phase of transformation for some years now, driven by digital technologies but also by the emergence of an increasingly open and dynamic business model along the entire supply chain: this is the concept of company-platform, which stands out for its agility and ability to interconnect with the socio-economic ecosystem in which opera “- declared Francesco Ciuccarelli, CIO and CTO of the Alpitour Group – “ This path has been accelerated by the recent crisis, which has made evident the importance of adaptability, elasticity of infrastructures and applications: in a word, of resilience. The collaboration with IBM aims to build this capability, first by taking over legacy infrastructures and applications, then introducing new enabling technologies, such as Red Hat OpenShift, and finally using AI in various areas of the Alpitour Group, from contact center to sales. B2C “.

“ We manage a huge wealth of information and thanks to the exponential technological advances of recent years, it has arrived time to extract value from this data. We are all strongly committed to pursuing the objective of managing information, going beyond the role of observers “ – he explains – underlines Fabio Olgiati, manager of the AI ​​& Automation competence center of the Alpitour Group – “ The introduction of AI solutions in the e-mail channel will not only bring added value, but will also be the enabling challenge to achieve full mastery of technology, a necessary prerequisite for experimenting with future, new channels “.