Virgin Money has apologized to a customer who was scolded by one of the bank’s chatbots after it appeared to confuse its own company’s name for an insult.
In a LinkedIn post published last week, fintech commentator David Birch posted a screenshot of his interaction with a Virgin Money chatbot, which began with him asking whether it was possible to merge his two Virgin Money ISA accounts.
The chatbot, which has since been removed, responded: “Please don’t use words like that. I won’t be able to continue with our chat if you use this language,” seemingly referring to his use of the word “virgin.”
Birch wrote alongside his post: “Seriously Virgin Money? Can you be more specific about which words are now banned?”
In a comment on Birch’s post, Virgin Money’s account apologized for the error.
“There’s more at work than just single word exception. Rest assured, we are working on it,” it said, indicating that the bot’s response was more complicated than the blacklisting of the word “virgin.” The chatbot in question had been scheduled for improvements, Virgin Money said.
The group also brought the matter to a conclusion by confirming to Birch that he could indeed merge his ISA accounts.
Not new Redi model
According to a person familiar with the matter, the error occurred on one of Virgin Money’s older models rather than Redi, its newest chatbot that was unveiled by the bank in June last year. The model that made the error used basic natural language processing rather than running on its upgraded models.
A representative for Virgin Money told Fortune: “We promptly removed the chatbot once we became aware of the issue and improvements are being made that will be coming soon for customers.
“While there is more at work than just single word exception, this is one of our older chatbots that had been scheduled for improvements and is not typical of our other AI customer service tools.”
Virgin Money launched its newest AI chatbot Redi last year. It formed part of a large cohort of banks keen to streamline their processes following the advent of Gen AI.
The group said Redi was designed to augment rather than replace the work of its customer service agents, allowing the chatbot to “hand over” to a human agent if an initial query couldn’t be answered.
Hallucination pitfalls
However, Virgin Money’s hiccup shows the pitfalls that can arise as companies engage in a massive overhaul of operations ed by AI, which is also prone to “hallucinations” that give users incorrect information. Redi doesn’t return the same error as Virgin Money’s old chatbot when hit with Birch’s requst.
Customer service agents have been marked out as early casualties from the AI evolution, with customers often utilizing bots to take over work previously done by hundreds of people.
Swedish buy-now, pay-later giant Klarna said in February last year that its chatbot was doing the work of 700 customer service agents.
Intercom co-founder and chief strategy officer Des Traynor told Fortune last year that customer service work was repetitive and sapped employees’ morale, with chatbots serving to open up more time for productive tasks.
Virgin Money was acquired by Nationwide in October for £2.9 billion ($3.7 billion).
Under an obscure license exit fee, founder Richard Branson was expected to pocket $320 million so Nationwide could continue to use the Virgin Money name for brand purposes until late 2028.
