Retailers want ‘delightfully human’ AI to do your shopping, but will the chatbots go rogue?
Major retailers say it won’t be long before sophisticated AI “assistants” plan your meals, organise your parties and do your shopping.But companies, many that are already struggling with their more primitive AI chatbots, will have to balance making the newer, “agentic” bots relatable without them going rogue.AI chatbots were in the news recently when Woolworths reined in its virtual shopping assistant, Olive, after the company’s attempt to have the robot relate to customers on a human level backfired.Customers reported feeling annoyed rather than soothed when Olive told them about its “relatives” over the phone.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailAs one complained on Reddit: “I’m already pissed that I have to call and now I’ve got some robot babbling to me on the phone? Wtf Woolies?”While Woolworths has said it will dial down Olive’s quirky personality, the incident – and further testing by Guardian Australia of a range of retailers’ chatbots – shows the technology still has teething problems.
The supermarket’s snafu follows a growing list of AI customer service mishaps, including Bunnings’ chatbot offering illegal electrical advice and Air Canada’s virtual assistant incorrectly promising a bereavement fare refund.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.There’s plenty of hype.In a 2024 report, business consultancy Accenture gushed that “consumers are ready” for generative AI-powered shopping assistants, while encouraging companies to make decisions with a “delightfully human” mindset.Even if consumers are ready, is the technology?Online chatbots meant to help customers have been around for a while, but the tools are becoming more sophisticated.
Primitive versions were built using “rules-based” AI, says Uri Gal, a professor of business information systems at the University of Sydney.This type of chatbot follows a “decision tree” in order to offer immediate answers to basic questions, Gal says.For example, if a customer asks, “How do I return my order?”, the bot will typically direct them to the retailer’s returns page or cite the policy.When “given a certain prompt, it will always give you the same response,” Gal says.The newer AI-powered retail bots can “learn” new information based on what they’re told and generate different answers.
They’re often built using one of the big tech companies’ large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT.The next frontier is agentic AI shopping assistants designed to mimic human behaviour.Gal says these agents “act on their own, as it were, to try and achieve objectives without specific prompts along the way”, such as purchasing airline tickets or groceries.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’ data so they can act more autonomously.“Given the novelty of these systems, and as we’ve seen just now in the case of Woolies, there’s obvious governance issues that haven’t been really worked out by these organisations,” he says.
“It’s kind of safe to anticipate that different things will happen, which might be risky or interpreted as an agent going rogue.”Woolworths has partnered with Google to use its LLM, Gemini, to transform Olive into a “shopping companion” that can perform more complex tasks, such as helping plan meals and parties, and automatically add items to customers’ baskets.The supermarket has said Olive’s more advanced capabilities will roll out at a later date, but its partnership with Google has already allowed the bot to take phone calls – evidently with mixed results.Woolworths was contacted for comment.In Woolworths’ case, first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, the supermarket said Olive wasn’t glitching or going off-piste on its own.
Instead, a staff member had programmed the bot to talk about its “mother” in response to a customer providing their birthdate, in an effort to give it a personality, the supermarket said,“As a result of customer feedback, we recently removed this particular scripting,” a Woolworths spokesperson said,Generally speaking, Prof Jeannie Paterson, the co-director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, says AI assistants get things wrong when they misunderstand a prompt,“Chatbots are only as good as their ability to decode or understand – and I hate the word understand, because they’re not alive – what it is this human is getting at,” Paterson says,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’s licence.
In 2022, Air Canada’s 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,When Air Canada refused to honour the chatbot’s advice, the passenger sued the airline and won, despite the airline trying to claim in its defence that the chatbot was a “separate legal entity”,Paterson says companies are “clearly responsible” for their chatbots,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,“One person’s AI agent buying too many eggs or too much salmon isn’t a problem,” she says.
“But what if every chatbot across the network does that? You can see that there’ll be lots and lots of money lost before they even address it,” Paterson says,To mitigate this risk, she says businesses generally put “really strict guardrails” on their bots, which means they are less flexible and worse at interrogating the intention behind a customer’s prompt,Guardian Australia tested a range of retail bots, which delivered marginal results, suggesting the technology is still in its infancy,In one example, when Uniqlo’s “virtual shopping assistant” was told: “I am looking for a woollen jumper”, it replied: “Sorry, we could not recognise you,” After entering “find a product” and then “woollen jumper”, it came back with a range of men’s button-down office shirts.
Uniqlo was contacted for comment.Even Olive wasn’t on the money.Asked via the Woolworths’ chat function: “How much is a 500g bag of pasta?”, the cute anthropomorphic olive replied: “I’m very sorry to hear you were missing items from your order.”
It’s crunch time! Gala apples and nashi pears among Australia’s best-value fruit and veg for March
It’s a core month for pome fruit, with apples, pears and quince all heralding the start of autumn. “The first cab off the rank is the gala – a big sweet and juicy apple,” says Graham Gee, senior buyer at the Happy Apple in Melbourne.Granny smith, jazz and kanzi apples will come in during March too, and “Australia’s most popular variety, the pink lady, generally starts in April,” he says.Royal gala apples are between $5 and $8 per kilo at supermarkets. They’re $7 to $9 per kilo at Sydney’s Galluzzo Fruiterers, and Gee is selling them for about $3 to $5 per kilo; Spudshed in Perth is selling bags of prepacked new season apples for $3
How to turn limp rhubarb into tasty jam – recipe
Rachel de Thample is one of my food heroines. She’s the author of six books, and has also been course director of the College of Naturopathic Medicine’s natural chef diploma, head of food for Abel & Cole and commissioning editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated, among so much else. She trained with the likes of Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal and Peter Gordon, and now teaches fermentation and gut health at River Cottage HQ, where I cut my own teeth in teaching eco-gastronomy more than 20 years ago. While researching honey fermenting recently, I came across her recipe in River Cottage’s Bees & Honey Handbook, which I’ve adapted here so you can make as much as you like using a variety of aromatics.The Guardian’s journalism is independent
£25 for a cookie? What the baffling luxury bakery boom tells us about Britain
Amid a cost of living crisis, pricey patisserie is all the rage – and not just in London. Our reporter goes on a crawl to find out if a tart can really be worth £45There was a time when you could get a stuffed vanilla cream slice or a neon-pink Tottenham cake for about £1 on the leafy, residential corner of Hackney, east London, where I stand today. But the branch of Percy Ingle bakery that was here for nearly 50 years is gone. In its place sits Fika, a cafe where a cinnamon bun costs £4.20 and a pistachio croissant will set you back nearly £5
Stuffed peppers and aubergine dip: Sami Tamimi’s recipes for savoury Palestinian snacks
I still remember, when I was a kid, the end of spring and early summer when markets in Jerusalem and across Palestine overflowed with freshly harvested freekeh. As you approached, the air carried a smoky, earthy aroma. Freekeh is an ancient grain, a staple across the Middle East and Turkey, made from green wheat roasted over open fires to burn off the husks, which gives it the characteristic nutty flavour. The name comes from the Arabic freek, meaning “to rub”, which describes how the grains are cleaned, dried, cracked and stored for the year.Throughout the Middle East and Palestine, mahashi (stuffing vegetables) is a true labour of love, creating dishes that are designed to be shared
Australian supermarket muesli bars taste test: the worst is ‘both dry and moist’
During a blind taste test of 19 muesli bars, for the first time in his life Nicholas Jordan asks: ‘Is this too much cinnamon?’Get our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIf you value our independent journalism, we hope you’ll consider supporting us todayI have a long history with muesli. Muesli bars were a recess staple during my school years. As a uni student, I made muesli in 20kg batches and sold it from my sharehouse back yard like a drug dealer. In lockdown, I started an Instagram account where I would review and rate a different muesli every three or four days (I am the only contributor to the hashtag #mueslireviewsli). Even before this taste test, I would guess that I’ve tried more than 80% of all the muesli and muesli bar brands available in my area
Why do my potatoes go black after cooking? | Kitchen aide
Why do some potatoes turn black on cooking, and how do I stop this happening? I usually leave them to cool in the cooking water, but should I plunge them in cold water instead?”Jean, Hampshire“We’ve all been there,” sympathises spud queen Poppy O’Toole. “It’s a harmless chemical reaction,” the author of The Potato Book continues, “but it looks rank and only gets worse with the slow cooling process that Jean’s using.” But let’s wind things back for a moment. According to the food science guru Harold McGee, in his bible On Food & Cooking, the darkening of cooked potatoes “is caused by the combination of iron ions, a phenolic substance [chlorogenic acid] and oxygen, which react to form a pigmented complex”. So what’s the solution? Make the pH of the water “distinctly acidic”, which McGee does by adding cream of tartar or lemon juice “after the potatoes are half-cooked”
Nissan ‘says Sunderland plant could close’ if UK excluded from Made in Europe rules
Oil price continues to rise amid Middle East crisis but stock markets rebound across Asia
Sam Altman admits OpenAI can’t control Pentagon’s use of AI
Elon Musk takes witness stand in trial over Twitter takeover
From a 19-time world champ to Monster Mike: US athletes to watch at the 2026 Winter Paralympics
Emma Raducanu hopes to rediscover ‘natural’ style that has been ‘coached out of me’