this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Air Canada's chatbot gave a B.C. man the wrong information. Now, the airline has to pay for the mistake (bc.ctvnews.ca)
submitted 9 months ago by Evkob@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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Jake Moffatt was booking a flight to Toronto and asked the bot about the airline's bereavement rates – reduced fares provided in the event someone needs to travel due to the death of an immediate family member.

Moffatt said he was told that these fares could be claimed retroactively by completing a refund application within 90 days of the date the ticket was issued, and submitted a screenshot of his conversation with the bot as evidence supporting this claim.

The airline refused the refund because it said its policy was that bereavement fare could not, in fact, be claimed retroactively.

Air Canada argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by the bot.

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[–] Deceptichum@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It’s probably half that, but a chatbot can serve thousands of users whereas an employee can manage a few at a time.

[–] Mossheart@lemmy.ca 5 points 9 months ago

Confirmed. As someone who has led customer operations at large companies, the scale of chatbots to address a userbase is absurd. Companies are more than willing to take the hit to their reputation and customer goodwill in exchange for not needing to hire as much staff, train them, manage their schedules or deal with benefits and performance reviews. Cutting all that cost is an instaboner to execs and a nightmare to support managers who actually care about quality.

The amount of $700 judgements that Air Canada would need to be hit with to make replacing humans with chatbots a losing proposition is too high. It'll never happen.

Sadly, in my decade of experience, I've yet to see any bots able to reliably handle much beyond 'where's my order?'.