Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\nAs one complained on Reddit: \u201cI\u2019m already pissed that I have to call and now I\u2019ve got some robot babbling to me on the phone? Wtf Woolies?\u201d<\/p>\n
While Woolworths has said it will dial down Olive\u2019s quirky personality, the incident \u2013 and further testing by Guardian Australia of a range of retailers\u2019 chatbots \u2013 shows the technology still has teething problems.<\/p>\n
The supermarket\u2019s snafu follows a growing list of AI customer service mishaps, including Bunnings\u2019 chatbot offering illegal electrical advice and Air Canada\u2019s virtual assistant incorrectly promising a bereavement fare refund.<\/p>\n
ASX-listed companies Woolworths, Coles and Wesfarmers (owner of Bunnings, Kmart, Officeworks and Priceline) are among the businesses that have announced plans for agentic shopping assistants.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s plenty of hype. In a 2024 report, business consultancy Accenture gushed that \u201cconsumers are ready\u201d for generative AI-powered shopping assistants, while encouraging companies to make decisions with a \u201cdelightfully human\u201d mindset.<\/p>\n
Even if consumers are ready, is the technology?<\/p>\n
A customer service transformation<\/p>\n
Online chatbots meant to help customers have been around for a while, but the tools are becoming more sophisticated.<\/p>\n
Primitive versions were built using \u201crules-based\u201d AI, says Uri Gal, a professor of business information systems at the University of Sydney.<\/p>\n
This type of chatbot follows a \u201cdecision tree\u201d in order to offer immediate answers to basic questions, Gal says.<\/p>\n
For example, if a customer asks, \u201cHow do I return my order?\u201d, the bot will typically direct them to the retailer\u2019s returns page or cite the policy.<\/p>\n
When \u201cgiven a certain prompt, it will always give you the same response,\u201d Gal says.<\/p>\n
The newer AI-powered retail bots can \u201clearn\u201d new information based on what they\u2019re told and generate different answers.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re often built using one of the big tech companies\u2019 large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
The next frontier is agentic AI shopping assistants designed to mimic human behaviour.<\/p>\n
Gal says these agents \u201cact on their own, as it were, to try and achieve objectives without specific prompts along the way\u201d, such as purchasing airline tickets or groceries.<\/p>\n
Gal says agentic AI operates with more ambiguity, which comes with an added level of risk, including privacy concerns if the bots have greater access to customers\u2019 data so they can act more autonomously.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the novelty of these systems, and as we\u2019ve seen just now in the case of Woolies, there\u2019s obvious governance issues that haven\u2019t been really worked out by these organisations,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of safe to anticipate that different things will happen, which might be risky or interpreted as an agent going rogue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Woolworths has partnered with Google to use its LLM, Gemini, to transform Olive into a \u201cshopping companion\u201d that can perform more complex tasks, such as helping plan meals and parties, and automatically add items to customers\u2019 baskets.<\/p>\n
The supermarket has said Olive\u2019s more advanced capabilities will roll out at a later date, but its partnership with Google has already allowed the bot to take phone calls \u2013 evidently with mixed results.<\/p>\n
Woolworths was contacted for comment.<\/p>\n
When things go wrong<\/p>\n
In Woolworths\u2019 case, first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, the supermarket said Olive wasn\u2019t glitching or going off-piste on its own.<\/p>\n
Instead, a staff member had programmed the bot to talk about its \u201cmother\u201d in response to a customer providing their birthdate, in an effort to give it a personality, the supermarket said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a result of customer feedback, we recently removed this particular scripting,\u201d a Woolworths spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
Generally speaking, Prof Jeannie Paterson, the co-director of the University of Melbourne\u2019s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, says AI assistants get things wrong when they misunderstand a prompt.<\/p>\n
\u201cChatbots are only as good as their ability to decode or understand \u2013 and I hate the word understand, because they\u2019re not alive \u2013 what it is this human is getting at,\u201d Paterson says.<\/p>\n
Last year, Bunnings was criticised after its AI chatbot told a Queensland customer how to rewire an extension cord, despite it being illegal for them to do so without an electrician\u2019s licence.<\/p>\n
In 2022, Air Canada\u2019s chatbot incorrectly told a passenger they could buy tickets at full price and later apply for a bereavement fare refund, when no such policy existed.<\/p>\n
When Air Canada refused to honour the chatbot\u2019s advice, the passenger sued the airline and won, despite the airline trying to claim in its defence that the chatbot was a \u201cseparate legal entity\u201d.<\/p>\n
Paterson says companies are \u201cclearly responsible\u201d for their chatbots.<\/p>\n
She says businesses try to strike a delicate balance between having a responsive, adaptable AI assistant and the risk of the bot going rogue, or providing incorrect advice that could cost them money.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne person\u2019s AI agent buying too many eggs or too much salmon isn\u2019t a problem,\u201d she says. \u201cBut what if every chatbot across the network does that? You can see that there\u2019ll be lots and lots of money lost before they even address it,\u201d Paterson says.<\/p>\n
To mitigate this risk, she says businesses generally put \u201creally strict guardrails\u201d on their bots, which means they are less flexible and worse at interrogating the intention behind a customer\u2019s prompt.<\/p>\n
Guardian Australia tested a range of retail bots, which delivered marginal results, suggesting the technology is still in its infancy.<\/p>\n
In one example, when Uniqlo\u2019s \u201cvirtual shopping assistant\u201d was told: \u201cI am looking for a woollen jumper\u201d, it replied: \u201cSorry, we could not recognise you.\u201d After entering \u201cfind a product\u201d and then \u201cwoollen jumper\u201d, it came back with a range of men\u2019s button-down office shirts. Uniqlo was contacted for comment.<\/p>\n
Even Olive wasn\u2019t on the money. Asked via the Woolworths\u2019 chat function: \u201cHow much is a 500g bag of pasta?\u201d, the cute anthropomorphic olive replied: \u201cI\u2019m very sorry to hear you were missing items from your order.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Major retailers say it won\u2019t be long before sophisticated AI \u201cassistants\u201d plan your meals, organise your parties and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-323602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}