Air Canada's chatbot gave a B.C. man the wrong information. Now, the airline has to pay for the mistake
Air Canada's chatbot gave a B.C. man the wrong information. Now, the airline has to pay for the mistake
Air Canada has been ordered to compensate a B.C. man because its chatbot gave him inaccurate information.
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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just hire a damn employee
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.
Yeah, I want to see who will buy the garbage they are selling when no one has money.
Doesn't matter to their shareholders. They'll have already made their money.
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.
It costs your employer about 30% more to employ you than what you earn (approximately) - so hiring someone for 75k will usually cost a company somewhere around 100k.
It’s probably half that, but a chatbot can serve thousands of users whereas an employee can manage a few at a time.
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?'.
I didn't say they would pay $100k. I said it would cost probably $100k including benefits - a full time employee cost isn't just their salary or hourly wage. There's lots of overhead cost to employ a person at a large company. Also keep in mind this is for a Canadian, so don't be thinking in USD. In CAD in the Toronto area (for example), it isn't unreasonable to think even a first line phone based customer service agent salary would be between $65-70k, then the employee expenses on top of that.
LOL customer service agents do NOT get paid $65-70k
Well, you're just wrong about that. I worked for a company that employed front of the line customer service in Toronto that paid $80k...in 2017! I'm not saying Air Canada does (I have no idea what AC wages are), but if their agents are part of a union, it's definitely possible.
But my point stands - if anyone thinks these companies are going to 'do the right thing' and hire real people when these AI chatbots exist and are so cheap, it's just not going to happen.