Elevated guest journeys and smarter mountain operations, powered by agentic intelligence
Serre Chevalier, one of the largest year‑round mountain destinations in the Southern Alps and a flagship site within the Compagnie des Alpes group, welcomes visitors whose expectations have steadily grown alongside the resort’s offerings. As the experience expanded, a fundamental touchpoint—selecting the right ski pass became unexpectedly complex. What appears to be a simple choice depends on multiple variables, including ski zone, duration, experience level, and seasonal conditions. These nuances drove a high volume of routine questions, particularly during peak periods, signalling that visitors found it hard to feel confident in their selections.
The resort had relied on an earlier generation of digital assistant technology to support these interactions, and while it served visitors well for many seasons, the nature of inquiries had evolved. Questions became more varied, more context‑dependent, and increasingly multilingual, stretching the capabilities of the existing tool and requiring customer service teams to intervene more often. The challenge wasn’t that the previous solution failed; rather, the resort’s operational and experiential needs had outpaced what the older system was designed to deliver.
Behind the immediate need to streamline ski‑pass selection was a broader ambition to ensure that the visitor journey felt clear, intuitive, and reassuring from the moment planning began. Serre Chevalier wanted guests to navigate essential decisions quickly and easily, reducing friction early in the process so the overall experience of the stay could begin on a positive note.
To address the growing complexity of visitor inquiries and create a smoother start to the guest journey, Serre Chevalier partnered with IBM and Business Partner Next Decision to develop an agentic AI solution powered by IBM watsonx Orchestrate® on IBM Cloud®. Working with IBM Client Engineering, the teams aligned early on the objectives, workflows, and data inputs the system would need to coordinate. With this foundation established, the project moved quickly: the new experience went live in approximately two and a half weeks, an unusually fast timeline for a deployment involving multiple systems and AI components.
Implementation itself was a collaborative effort, with Next Decision leading the build and integration work, drawing on its familiarity with the resort’s systems and visitor journey. And, IBM worked alongside the team to provide product expertise, architectural guidance, and hands‑on technical support, helping refine how the AI agents reasoned, retrieved information, and interacted with guests.
As the solution moved into daily use, Serre Chevalier adopted additional capabilities within the IBM watsonx™ portfolio of products to strengthen reliability and oversight. The resort now uses IBM watsonx.governance® to give marketing and operations teams clearer visibility through improved dashboards and multi‑LLM monitoring. It also relies on IBM watsonx.ai™ to automate recurring data‑gathering tasks, including daily web‑scraping routines that feed essential operational workflows.
The AI experience itself is built as a coordinated set of agents rather than a traditional chatbot. These agents interpret visitor intent, access relevant knowledge, and trigger supporting tools such as small Python‑based utilities to gather or process information in real time. This agentic design enables the system to guide visitors through ski‑pass selection, trip planning, and practical questions with greater clarity and depth.
Embedded directly into the Serre Chevalier website, the experience meets visitors at a natural point in their planning journey and provides intuitive support without requiring them to shift channels or search for information.
Since the start of the winter season, the AI agent has handled more than 1,500 customer conversations, reducing routine workload for service teams. This shift gives advisors more time to focus on complex or high‑value interactions. Service responsiveness also improved, with 94% of visitor claims now resolved in under 48 hours, marking a meaningful step forward in both efficiency and support quality. Early optimization work strengthened the experience even further, reducing response latency from 6–8 seconds to about 1 second and creating a faster, more intuitive interaction flow for guests planning their stay.
What began as a focused customer‑care initiative has grown into a blueprint for AI‑supported operations, demonstrating how orchestration can connect tasks, systems, and knowledge across the resort. Serre Chevalier is now expanding agentic AI into additional areas, with early prototypes underway for artificial‑snow monitoring, where AI agents could help interpret conditions and support operational teams during the winter season. Teams are also exploring HR process automation to better support the resort’s highly seasonal workforce—using orchestrated, agent‑driven workflows to streamline onboarding, surface relevant information quickly, and reduce repetitive administrative tasks.
Equipment management is another area with significant potential for AI‑driven support. Given the amount of equipment distributed across the mountain, the resort is evaluating predictive‑maintenance dashboards powered by watsonx Orchestrate to help monitor and manage these assets. Architectural work is currently underway to determine the best way to integrate this capability with existing systems. As these opportunities progress, Serre Chevalier is beginning to shape a more connected operational model that applies agentic intelligence not only to visitor engagement, but to the core functions that keep the mountain running.
Founded in 1941, Serre Chevalier is one of France’s most popular winter and summer mountain resorts. Located at the gates of the Ecrins National Park in the Southern Alps, the valley offers varied terrain—from larch‑forest skiing to freestyle areas and night skiing on the UNESCO‑listed Vauban slope—and spans the communes of Le Monêtier‑les‑Bains, Villeneuve, Chantemerle and Briançon.
Next Decision is an IBM Business Partner and consulting firm specializing in decision‑making technologies and business intelligence. Based in France, the firm supports organizations with user‑focused BI and data projects spanning sectors such as energy, industry, banking, insurance, retail, transport and the public sector.
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© Copyright IBM Corporation April, 2026.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.