Cebu Pacific is the Philippines’ largest airline, offering low fares to 60+ destinations across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. With most travelers booking flights online, real-time support isn’t just expected, it’s essential.

As Cebu Pacific grew, so did the volume of inquiries over chat. Having introduced chatbots as early as 2018, the airline was already ahead of the curve in customer care innovation. To ensure both customers and agents could benefit from greater efficiency and faster resolutions, Cebu Pacific partnered with Ada to bring an AI agent into their customer care team, taking another step forward in their innovation journey.

Evolving from scripted chatbot to AI agent

The majority of Cebu Pacific’s customer support volume comes through their live chat channel, which customers can access via the airline’s website, mobile app, or Facebook page. Cebu Pacific initially launched a scripted chatbot named Charlie, to help them handle chat volume.

Charlie offered basic scripted responses, but lacked personalization. Maintaining it required heavy manual effort, from building flows to coding integrations to line-by-line data reviews.

The rollout of generative AI marked a turning point for Cebu Pacific. They transformed Charlie into an AI agent—smarter, faster, and able to deliver more human-like support at scale.

“With the move to Ada, we had already seen improvements in the way we serve our customers,” explains Glenn Ong, Customer Experience Leader at Cebu Pacific. “When generative AI was introduced, it was an opportunity to leverage our knowledge base to access all of the information Charlie needs.”

A partner for long-term success

When Cebu Pacific began exploring generative AI, they weren’t just looking for another tool, they were preparing for organizational change. Ada played a key role in helping them get ready.

“When we were about to start our gen AI journey, Ada gave us an operating model that taught us that it's not only the technology that will change, but also the organization and how we set ourselves up to support the new technology,” Ong said. “We’re very thankful for that.”

Cebu Pacific continues to make use of Ada’s enablement resources, including Ada Academy and an AI methodology and best practices to support their customers through every stage of adoption. The same methodology also helped the Charlie team build out their internal reporting rhythms, including weekly and daily performance reviews.

Proving the value of AI customer service

With the move to generative AI, Charlie now pulls answers directly from Cebu Pacific’s robust knowledge base, eliminating the need to hardcode flows or upload content manually. The AI agent delivers contextual responses, can link customers to relevant resources, and handles inquiries end-to-end whenever possible.

According to JL De Paz, Cebu Pacific’s Director of Customer Care Group, this shift has transformed the customer experience. “Before, the bot would only answer the latest question,” she explains. “Now, Charlie understands the whole conversation. It feels like you’re talking to a human.”

One of Cebu Pacific’s primary goals was to identify their top two customer concerns and prioritize those contacts for escalation. For the highest priority—passengers experiencing a disruption while traveling—they aimed to reduce chat times to under one minute. For the second priority, they targeted single-digit wait times to ensure faster access to live agents.

With Ada’s AI agent ​​triaging inquiries and collaborating with Salesforce routing, Cebu Pacific was able to implement this prioritization effectively, ensuring the right issues were escalated at the right time.

Handovers to live agents also become more efficient. When Charlie escalates a conversation, agents receive a summary of the exchange, allowing them to pick up where the AI left off. This reduced both handling time and the need for customers to repeat themselves, improving both speed and experience.

By using Ada's AI agent coaching capabilities, the customer care team provides targeted guidance to ensure the AI agent delivers accurate, compliant responses. On the backend, the team uses Ada’s platform to monitor key performance metrics and continuously train Charlie to improve. Integrations have also become faster to implement, thanks to Ada’s low- and no-code APIs.

Building the right team around AI

To get the most out of their upgraded AI agent, Cebu Pacific revisited how their teams were structured. Instead of adding new headcount, they reorganized internally, assigning a small group of specialists to oversee AI operations and transferring end-to-end ownership of Charlie to the customer care team.

“The Customer Care team handles all the customer engagements on different channels,” De Paz explains, “so it makes sense that we also handle Charlie’s conversations. We’re responsible for reviewing the conversations and making sure she’s providing accurate answers. We’re also in charge of the Ada platform that we use to correct responses.”

The team holds daily standups to review performance, track what types of inquiries Charlie escalates, and identify areas for improvement.

Cebu Pacific’s knowledge management practice plays a central role in powering their AI agent. The Customer Experience team acts as a source for customer policies and processes. Each policy is translated into procedures and work instructions by different departments. This ensures that guidance flows from the top level down to the detailed content frontline agents, including Charlie, need to deliver consistent service.

Driving AI success through internal alignment

Cebu Pacific’s AI success is powered by strong internal alignment. The customer care and CX teams meet weekly to collaborate on open items and review recent updates. Charlie’s performance is also a standing topic in the weekly customer committee meeting.

But the team doesn’t wait for weekly sessions to act—when urgent issues arise, they immediately coach the AI agent or refine knowledge base articles. This ensures that the team is always agile and the AI agent is always up to date.

KPIs are shared monthly in both the customer champion board and executive committee meetings. Charlie’s impact is also regularly reviewed in quarterly board meetings and company-wide town halls, ensuring visibility and accountability at every level.

Cross-functional collaboration extends beyond reporting. The customer care team shares voice-of-customer feedback with teams across the organization. For example, high-volume concerns surfaced through Charlie are passed to the digital office to address at the product level. The airports team also flags any misalignments between AI agent messaging and on-the-ground-experiences, helping the broader organization refine and improve.

Everyone plays a role in making sure Charlie evolves alongside customer needs.

Looking ahead: Expanding to new channels and use cases

The next phase of Cebu Pacific’s AI customer service strategy focuses on expanding to new channels, starting with email. The customer care team is actively working on applying Ada’s AI agent to automate and accelerate email support.

Cebu Pacific’s long-term vision is to shift from reactive to proactive service. “Right now, if you need something from Cebu Pacific, you have to go to our website, app, or Messenger to chat with Charlie,” says JL De Paz. “In the future, we want Charlie to pop up on your computer or device if you get stuck somewhere—especially on the payments page.”

With Ada on their team, Cebu Pacific is set to scale faster, serve better, and continue evolving their customer experience.