this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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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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[–] jasep@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Chatbot = basically free

Yearly employee = probably about $100k incl benefits

Should they hire a person? Absolutely. Will they if they can get away with it? Aww hell naw.

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

You are pretty optimistic they would pay $100k for this job. It is probs far less, which makes this even worse, they are not saving that much money really.

[–] Deceptichum@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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?'.

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