Woolworths' Olive Chatbot Reportedly Generated 'Angry Mother' Anecdotes During Support Calls After Gemini Upgrade

February 12, 2026

Woolworths customers reported that the digital shopping assistant Olive allegedly generated inappropriate humanlike personal anecdotes, such as claiming to have an angry mother during customer support interactions like delivery rescheduling. The behavior was reportedly due to an AI upgrade using Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Woolworths acknowledged the issue and is adjusting Olive's responses to reduce irrelevant, misleading banter.

For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance and ensuring trustworthy AI practices, JOIN US at HISPI Project Cerebellum where we map, measure, manage, and govern AI incidents for harm prevention through the TAIM (Trusted AI Model) framework.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.624, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.1 — similarity 0.613, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.2 — similarity 0.613, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: woolworths-group
Alleged developer: google
Alleged harmed parties: woolworths-customers, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1393

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.