What your chatbot promises, you pay
A grieving customer asked a question, got an answer, and the company had to honour it. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, a British Columbia tribunal found the airline liable for negligent misrepresentation after its website chatbot described a refund rule the airline did not offer: the bot told a customer asking about bereavement fares that he could buy a full-price ticket and claim the discount back within 90 days of travel. Air Canada argued the chatbot was a separate entity and that the customer should have read a different page; the tribunal rejected that entirely and ordered the airline to pay C$812.02.
The amount is pocket change. The principle is the part that should interest you if you run a company of forty people and buy your AI off the shelf.
The misunderstanding about guardrails
Most owners I speak to treat governance as the thing you add once the bot works, and that order is backwards. The belief underneath it is that rules slow the rollout down. In practice the rules are what let you hand work over at all. A system that answers on your behalf only gets real authority when someone can be held to the answer, and that someone is you.
Courts have stopped treating this as an open question. On 12 May 2026 the Higher Regional Court of Hamm ruled (case 4 UKl 3/25) that a website chatbot is legally part of the business organisation and its invented statements are attributed to the operator, even with careful configuration; it is the first published German higher-court decision on chatbot liability.
Guardrails are not the brake on delegation. They are the mechanism of it.
What the rollbacks show
The companies with the best governance pull their bots back most often, and that is a sign of health. A Sinch survey of more than 2,500 senior decision-makers, released in May 2026, found that three-quarters of enterprises have already rolled back or shut down a customer-facing AI agent after deployment; among organisations with mature governance frameworks that rate rises to 81 percent, and a clear majority of rollbacks trace back to governance failures. Sinch reads the pattern as detection: firms with mature guardrails spot failures sooner.
Read that as good news. The ones who see it are the ones who built the instruments. The rest are running a bot that is making promises nobody is reading.
Four messages
Your customer decides inside four messages whether this company is a wall or a door. He is not grading your technology. He is checking whether the answer holds when he acts on it. An answer that holds is worth more to him than an answer that arrives in two seconds.
That is why trust has become a commercial asset rather than a compliance topic. Buyers, and increasingly the agents buying on their behalf, hand work to organisations that stand behind their own output. You win the shortlist long before the payment step.
Who has to move in your company
In a mid-sized business this change lands on the person who writes the policies, not on IT. That person usually has four other jobs. What gets in the way is ownership: the bot speaks for sales, service and finance at once, and none of the three feels responsible for what it said last Tuesday.
What changes when it works is quiet. Fewer promises you have to unpick. Faster approval to let the system actually do something, because the limits are written down.
What you do on Monday
- Name one owner for every answer your AI gives customers about money, delivery or eligibility.
- Write down the three things it may promise on its own, and route everything else to a person.
- Read last week's transcripts for an hour. Count the answers you would have to honour in a tribunal.
- Log every conversation in a way you can retrieve six months later, because a claim arrives late.
- Tell customers when they are talking to an agent and how to reach a human in one step.
If you want the decision rights and limits on paper before your next rollout, chapter 9 of CX+AI works through trust, governance and the new CX risks, and the AI Decision Rights template turns it into something your team can fill in this week. Bekijk de materialen