Deploys a mental-health chatbot, in British Columbia

2024 BCCRT 149

• Take reasonable care to ensure a customer-facing chatbot's statements are accurate and not misleading: the tribunal held that a company owes its customer a duty of care given their commercial relationship, and that a chatbot that was not reasonably accurate supported a claim of negligent misrepresentation.
• Treat everything a chatbot says on your website as your own statement: the tribunal held the company responsible for all the information on its website, whether it comes from a static page or a chatbot, and did not accept that a chatbot is a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions.
• Do not rely on a correct page elsewhere on your site to excuse an inaccurate chatbot answer: the tribunal noted that the company did not explain why the webpage was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot or why customers should double-check the chatbot against another part of its website.
• Produce the contract terms you rely on: the tribunal held a contractual defence unproven because the company asserted what its tariff said without providing the relevant portion of the contract.