{"id":217928,"date":"2026-02-27T00:37:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T05:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/27\/woolworths-ai-agent-rambled-about-its-mother-its-a-sign-of-deeper-problems-with-the-tech-rollout\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T01:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T06:20:09","slug":"woolworths-ai-agent-rambled-about-its-mother-its-a-sign-of-deeper-problems-with-the-tech-rollout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/27\/woolworths-ai-agent-rambled-about-its-mother-its-a-sign-of-deeper-problems-with-the-tech-rollout\/","title":{"rendered":"Woolworths\u2019 AI agent rambled about its \u2018mother\u2019. It\u2019s a sign of deeper problems with the tech rollout"},"content":{"rendered":"

Woolworths\u2019 AI agent rambled about its \u2018mother\u2019. It\u2019s a sign of deeper problems with the tech rollout<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/theconversation.com\/woolworths-ai-agent-rambled-about-its-mother-its-a-sign-of-deeper-problems-with-the-tech-rollout-277072<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-27 00:37:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: theconversation.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently some Australian shoppers got more than they bargained for when they chatted with Woolworths\u2019 artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Olive. <\/p>\n

Instead of sticking to groceries, recipes and basket suggestions, Olive reportedly produced strange, overly human-like responses. It talked about its \u201cmother\u201d and offered other personal-sounding details. <\/p>\n

Further testing revealed pricing errors for basic items. And when I asked about the price of a specific product, Olive didn\u2019t provide a clear answer. Instead, it checked whether the item was in stock and explained pickup fees.<\/p>\n

So what exactly is going on here? And what lessons might these incidents hold for businesses and consumers alike? <\/p>\n

What actually happened?<\/h2>\n

Olive is powered by a large language model (LLM). These models don\u2019t \u201cknow\u201d things the way humans do, nor do they have mothers. Using elaborate statistical analyses, they generate language that sounds plausible. <\/p>\n

Comments from a Woolworths spokesperson to the Australian Financial Review suggest that in Olive\u2019s case, the references to its supposed mother appear to have been pre-written scripts dating back several years. <\/p>\n

When users entered something that looked like a birthdate, the system likely triggered a matching \u201cfun fact\u201d from an old decision tree with pre-programmed responses.<\/p>\n

Woolworths says it has now removed this particular scripting \u201cas a result of customer feedback\u201d. <\/p>\n

The pricing errors point to a different problem. <\/p>\n

Because LLMs generate responses based on learned patterns rather than real-time data, they do not automatically know today\u2019s prices unless they are explicitly connected to a live database. <\/p>\n

If that grounding step is weak, the system can produce outdated prices. <\/p>\n

Not a new problem<\/h2>\n

Woolworths is not the first company to discover, after the fact, that its customer-facing AI had unexpectedly \u201cmisbehaved\u201d.<\/p>\n

In 2022, Air Canada\u2019s chatbot incorrectly told a passenger, Jake Moffatt, that…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Woolworths\u2019 AI agent rambled about its \u2018mother\u2019. It\u2019s a sign of deeper problems with the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":217929,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/720845\/original\/file-20260227-57-m0zgg5.png?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&rect=0%2C256%2C2048%2C1024&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20,18,17],"class_list":["post-217928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-large-language-model","tag-llm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217930,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217928\/revisions\/217930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}