HFS Challenger: IGT Solutions

At a glance

The latest firm to receive the coveted HFS Challenger accolade is IGT Solutions, a global customer experience (CX) specialist with roots in the airline industry. IGT is reimagining how CX is designed, delivered, and measured. Its heritage in travel, transportation, and hospitality (TTH) gave it the scale and complexity to test AI-first CX at industrial strength, but its ambition is much broader. It manages over 20 million monthly interactions and reaches nearly 100 million consumers annually through its AI-powered customer experience platforms.

By embedding AI into workflows, reducing agent variability, and reframing value around outcomes that tie directly to enterprise growth, IGT positions itself as a true CX challenger against global incumbents. What makes IGT different is its ability to industrialize complex CX operations in highly regulated and emotionally charged industries, proving that agility, empathy, and compliance can coexist at scale.

TTH was a proving ground for scalable CX

Founded in 1998 in Gurugram, India, IGT originated as part of the airline group that launched IndiGo Airlines. This aviation DNA gave it early credibility in high-pressure, regulated environments where CX is critical. Over two and a half decades, IGT scaled to more than 25,000 employees across 31 delivery centers in more than 13 countries.

IGT has steadily evolved from a niche, airline-focused outsourcer into a diversified provider of CX, IT services, and digital operations. Key milestones include the acquisition of OSSR in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia to strengthen its European footprint, and the launch of a multilingual hub in Cairo, inaugurated by Egypt’s Minister of Communications, to serve EMEA with cost and language advantages. The company has also invested in an Automation Center of Excellence and proprietary frameworks such as iTRIP, an automation lifecycle methodology, and dWizard, a reusable component library, to ensure repeatability and scalability. In December 2025, IGT’s acquisition of Yexle, a global Appian-premier services firm, deepened its low-code, process orchestration, and AI-driven transformation capabilities.

This trajectory shows a balance of domain depth with geographic and capability expansion. IGT is building on this foundation by layering IP and automation on top of operational excellence, creating a pathway to sustainable differentiation and long-term CX growth.

Complex CX processes became repeatable outcomes

IGT anchors its CX capabilities in SMART CX and SMARTworks, which are designed to automate repetitive tasks, augment human agents, and emphasize success metrics around business outcomes such as churn reduction, retention, and customer lifetime value alongside standard CX indicators.

Its Techbud.AI platform provides the foundation for a suite of accelerators, including agent assist, training and knowledge retrieval, and workflow automation. The company’s key solutions include:

• Omnichannel conversation AI: xBot.AI consolidates conversational channels into a unified framework, reducing customer friction between chat, voice, email, and social. Its value lies in mitigating the fragmentation seen with legacy chatbot deployments, aiming to create consistent CX outcomes across channels.
• Seamless mishandled baggage resolution: Baggage.AI converts a high-friction airline process into an automated workflow. It integrates with core airline systems for tracking, alerts, and claims management. This is a clear example of IGT transforming domain depth into reusable CX IP.
• Automated disruption claims: EU261Xpress.AI embeds automation into disruption-related refunds and compensation, reducing errors and ensuring compliance with EU regulations. This highlights IGT’s ability to codify regulatory processes into AI-enabled CX solutions.
• Software delivery productivity: SDLC.AI extends IGT’s AI-first strategy into IT services by applying GenAI across the software development lifecycle. While adoption is early, it reflects IGT’s push to platformize productivity beyond contact center operations.

By codifying operational pain points into AI-enabled solutions, IGT addresses one of the biggest CX challenges: inconsistency and inefficiency. Its ability to reduce agent variability is a direct response to one of the industry’s most persistent problems, creating differentiation as a challenger provider.

AI-led CX works in travel, but will it translate to other industries?

Looking ahead, IGT aims to extend beyond TTH into adjacent industries such as financial services, retail and e-commerce, and technology. It also plans to expand its services to adjacencies in trust and safety, AI and data, and sales-as-a-service. While these sectors also open doors for IT and BPO services, the company’s differentiation lies in extending its AI-led CX innovation into new domains. Its horizontal accelerators are designed to be industry-agnostic across agent assist, knowledge curation, and automation. The addition of Yexle strengthens IGT’s ability to extend its CX capabilities beyond contact center operations into enterprise workflows, enabling faster orchestration of customer journeys across regulated industries such as BFSI.

In addition, five global innovation centers are being launched to embed GenAI into delivery, supported by training programs to prepare 5,000 CX experts. Its GenAI toolkit already extends across its Procurement.AI, Recruitment.AI, iTag.AI for data annotation, and iQD for omnichannel queue management, signaling ambitions to platformize knowledge-intensive processes.

HFS’ take

HFS views IGT Solutions as a true challenger within customer experience. It reimagines delivery by embedding AI-first operations, reducing agent variability, and codifying complex processes into repeatable solutions. Its ability to industrialize travel-grade, regulated operations with measurable outcomes positions it as a credible alternative to global incumbents.

The challenge ahead is to amplify its platformization strategy, replicate success outside TTH, and prove that recent capability investments can establish IGT as an enterprise-ready CX partner. Success will depend on how effectively it can translate its proven domain expertise into multi-industry CX transformation.

For enterprises seeking agility, measurable CX outcomes, and a partner willing to break from the status quo, IGT stands out as a clear challenger.

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