Today I arrived on NZ103 from Auckland into Sydney.  While waiting for an onward connection to Singapore, I spotted ‘Chip’ the Air New Zealand robotic assistant. Chip was very busy greeting and assisting passengers boarding the return flight to back to Auckland. While it is very clever what you can achieve with robots these days, the dialogue was ”cute” and the interactions a bit too robotic for my liking.

Later when reading about this experience, I found out that the Commonwealth Bank and Air New Zealand have partnered to created ‘Chip’, an interactive customer service robot that was being trialled at Sydney Airport for five days which coincided nicely with my brief stopover. Chip is able to talk to people, direct them to their gates, assist with check-in and read their boarding pass.

The verdict – I personally don’t see this particular type of robot taking over the airline industry quite yet.