My AI scheduling bot went rogue on Monday...

I set up a simple chatbot to handle appointment bookings for my small handyman business. On Monday it double-booked me three times and told a customer I charged $200 for a job that should be $75. Took me an hour to untangle the mess and call everyone back. Has anyone else had their automation tools just totally misinterpret basic requests like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

joel2807d ago

Heard a podcast last week where a guy who builds these scheduling bots for contractors said the biggest issue is that most people treat them like a person instead of a system. In my experience, these tools are really literal about how you set them up. If your calendar sync had even one glitch or you didn't specify hard limits per time slot, the bot just takes that as permission to book however it sees fit. Same with the pricing mistake - maybe somewhere in your setup, the $200 got saved as a default or the bot pulled from the wrong service list. Your mileage may vary, but I'd double check every single settings page and run a test booking before trusting it live again.

emma_young7d ago

Oh come on, you can't blame the bot for user error here. You fed it bad data or didn't set it up right in the first place. These tools only do what you tell them to do. If it double-booked you three times, your calendar sync was clearly messed up or you didn't set availability windows properly. Same with the pricing mistake - that's a manual input error on your end, not the bot going rogue. I've run a bot for my own bookings for two years now with zero issues because I actually read the setup guides and tested it before going live. Sounds like you rushed the whole thing and then blamed the software when it followed your broken instructions.