Case Study: VIA Metropolitan Transit improves rider experience with IBM AI digital assistant Ava

Digital agent Ava guides San Antonio transit riders

VIA Metropolitan Transit, the public transportation provider in San Antonio, Texas, needed a better way to support riders outside call center hours and handle repetitive questions such as bus arrivals, fares, and service details. To improve customer service, VIA worked with IBM to build Ava, a multilingual digital assistant using IBM watsonx Assistant and IBM Cloud, along with data from call center records and transit APIs.

IBM helped VIA deploy Ava across its website and mobile app, where it now answers more than 150 common questions in English and Spanish and predicts real-time next-bus arrivals. Since launch, Ava has conducted more than 41,000 conversations with nearly 28,000 unique users, averages about 3,000 conversations per month, and responds to 96% of users, helping reduce call center volume and queue times while improving the customer experience.

VIA Metropolitan Transit

Steve Young

Vice President of Technology and Innovation