AI Insights
When a chatbot answers your customers
6 min read · Updated 2026-11-08
The bot borrows your voice
A chat widget on your site is not a side experiment. Visitors treat the answer as yours. If the bot invents a refund rule, a delivery date, or a medical suggestion, the visitor heard it from you. The vendor who supplied the widget did not stand in front of that customer.
That is a reason to limit the bot's job. Answering opening hours is a different task from advising someone on a contract or a diagnosis.
Say what it is, and leave a door
People should be able to tell they are talking to software. A clear label does that. They also need a path to a person when the question is about money, safety, an account, or a complaint. Hide that path and the bot becomes the only representative you have.
Keep a record of the answers the bot is allowed to give, and of the topics it must hand over. Review a sample of real conversations. The sample will show you the questions you forgot to list.
Start narrower than the demo
Demos show a bot that can talk about anything. A first deployment can do one job well: point people to published pages, collect a contact request, and stop. Widen the job only after you have seen the mistakes and named who fixes them.
This is general education, not legal advice. Disclosure duties differ by market. Our plain-English guide to the EU AI Act describes one set of transparency rules, and it does not describe every country.
This article is general education, not legal advice. ComplianceEU Alliance is an independent private initiative, not a regulator or certification body.