The chatbot that promised a refund

In November 2022, Jake Moffatt's grandmother died. The same day, he asked the chatbot on Air Canada's website about bereavement fares, the cheaper tickets some airlines offer after a death in the family.

The chatbot told him he could buy a full-price ticket now and apply for the bereavement discount within 90 days. He did. When he applied, Air Canada said its policy did not allow refunds after travel.

He took the case to British Columbia's Civil Resolution Tribunal. Air Canada argued, in effect, that the chatbot was responsible for its own words. In February 2024 the tribunal rejected this and ordered the airline to pay about C$812, including the fare difference of C$650.88.

The ruling does not say what technology powered the chatbot. But any chatbot that writes its own answers works the same basic way: it produces a reply that sounds right. Nothing in that process checks the reply against the company's real policy.

The tribunal's point was simple. A chatbot on your website is part of your website. Customers cannot be expected to know which page to trust, so the company owns every answer it gives.

The idea behind this caseLesson: Why AI makes things up →

1. 1Connect the chatbot to the official policy text and have it quote or link that text, instead of answering from memory.
2. 2Make the chatbot say "I'm not sure, here is the policy page" for money, refunds and legal terms.
3. 3Test the bot with real customer questions about edge cases, like refunds after travel, before it goes live.
4. 4Review a sample of chat logs every week and fix wrong answers quickly.
5. 5Treat what the bot says as what the company says, and give staff a clear way to honour or correct it.