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Virgin Money’s AI-powered chatbot has reprimanded a customer who used the word “virgin”, underlining the pitfalls of rolling out external artificial intelligence tools.
In a post last week on social media site LinkedIn, David Birch, a fintech commentator and Virgin Money customer, shared a picture of his online conversation with the bank in which he asked: “I have two ISAs with Virgin Money, how do I merge them?”
The bank’s customer service tool responded: “Please don’t use words like that. I won’t be able to continue our chat if you use this language,” suggesting that it deemed the word “virgin” inappropriate.
Virgin Money apologised for the mistake in a statement on LinkedIn and added there had been “more at work than just single word exception”.
“Rest assured, we are working on it,” the bank said. “This specific chatbot is one that had been scheduled for improvements which will be coming soon to customers.”
The bank declined to comment beyond its post on LinkedIn.
The incident comes as high-street banks across the UK are racing to roll out customer-facing generative AI tools in an effort to personalise their services and boost loyalty.
It also follows Nationwide’s £2.8bn acquisition of Virgin Money last year. The building society has vowed to improve the bank’s customer satisfaction scores. Virgin Money ranked 15th out of 16th in overall service quality in 2023, according to an industry-wide survey conducted by Ipsos.
Banks have used artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive efficiencies in back-office areas such as transaction monitoring for years. But since the first AI chatbots launched two years ago, they have also been experimenting with generative AI.
One worry for lenders is the risk of so-called hallucinations, which occur when chatbots spew out incorrect information. An Air Canada incident has become a cautionary tale for the industry. The airline was forced to compensate a customer after its AI chatbot wrongly told him he was entitled to a discount.
One person familiar with the situation at Virgin Money said the mishap had occurred on one of its oldest chatbots, powered by basic natural language processing and which was not running on its most recently upgraded models.
