AI Agents hooked up directly to the customer over SMS text messaging are a disaster waiting to happen.
A chatbot bug had real world consequences for a United Airlines customer last week – their booking got cancelled by mistake.
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| The United Airlines AI Agent gets it wrong over text message |
The chatbot presented two options:
A) Yes, cancel & get a refund
B) No, not ready to cancel
Pretty simple you’d think, but when the customer replied B, it completely lost the context of the command and went ahead with A, the opposite option.
So the lesson here is don’t trust a chatbot to know what its doing at all, and for anything important, just use the company’s app or website directly. If its a complex issue, call them up and talk to an actual employee… it will probably save your time in the end.
The simple text based interface was used for many years before windows & mouse interfaces became dominant during the 1990s. Unfortunately some AI agents aren’t capable of getting a basic text interface like this correct yet.
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| An old school text based menu interface |
References:
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1qrrvfd/am_i_stupid_for_did_i_just_get_screwed_by_the_ai/
https://www.slalom.com/au/en/customer-stories/united-airlines-gen-ai
https://www.cio.com/article/3969476/united-airlines-ai-strategy-the-airline-that-makes-decisions-fastest-wins.html