Customer Service Robot Scares Away Customers

January 22, 2018

A case study involving a customer service robot, Fabio, developed by Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, highlights the importance of responsible AI governance. The grocery store Margiotta reported that Fabio's unhelpful responses to customer questions caused confusion and even scared some customers away.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.693, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.657, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.656, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: heriot-watt-university, margiotta
Alleged developer: heriot-watt-university
Alleged harmed parties: store-patrons

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/64

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.