Dakai

Case Study

Lufthansa

About Lufthansa

Lufthansa Group is one of the world's largest aviation companies, operating across multiple airline brands and serving millions of passengers globally. With operations at this scale, even back-office functions like physical mail processing carry significant operational weight. In 2018, Lufthansa was exploring early applications of artificial intelligence to streamline internal workflows and trusted Dakai to pioneer one of its first workforce automation initiatives.

The Situation

Lufthansa's internal mail processing department employed 30 people to manually sort, categorise, and distribute official physical correspondence across the organisation. The process was entirely manual: slow, error-prone, and creating persistent bottlenecks across departments. Mail frequently ended up with the wrong recipients, triggering long email chains to reroute it. There was no centralised record of what had been received, by whom, or when. Lufthansa needed a system that could eliminate these inefficiencies without disrupting the flow of critical communications.

The Results

Dakai delivered an end-to-end intelligent mail processing system that reduced Lufthansa's 30-person department to just 2 operators. The remaining staff simply scanned incoming mail and from that point forward, everything was automated.

The system extracted key information from scanned documents, categorised and labelled each item, uploaded it to a centralised drive, and automatically routed it to the correct recipient, eliminating the manual email chains that had previously clogged internal communications.

A real-time dashboard gave leadership full visibility into mail volume, categorisation, routing accuracy, and processing times, turning a previously opaque process into a transparent, measurable operation.

The Technical Details

Intelligent Document Processing

Built a pre-LLM AI pipeline capable of extracting, categorising, and labelling information from scanned physical mail

Automated Routing

Developed smart routing logic that matched each piece of correspondence to the correct recipient, eliminating manual forwarding and email chains

Centralised Storage

Integrated with Lufthansa's internal drive infrastructure for automatic upload, organisation, and retrieval of all processed documents

Operations Dashboard

Created a real-time dashboard recording all mail activity, providing full visibility into processing metrics and routing accuracy

Used Tech Stack

Ruby on Rails, Python, React, Abbyy

Client Testimonial

"Dakai took a process we had accepted as manual and made it almost entirely autonomous. The dashboard alone changed how we think about operational visibility. This project set the standard for what automation could look like across the group."

Lufthansa Group, Internal Operations

Client Testimonial

Lufthansa Group, Internal Operations

Looking Ahead

This project was one of Lufthansa's earliest forays into AI-driven workforce automation, and it proved the model. A department that once required 30 full-time staff now operates with 2 people and a scanner, with higher accuracy and complete traceability. The success of this engagement established a blueprint for how intelligent automation could be applied across other operational functions within the Lufthansa Group.