Generative AI
Your AI is lying to you (and costing you money): the danger of corporate “hallucinations”
Is your chatbot making up answers? Find out what AI hallucinations are and how Oksigenia implements RAG systems to ensure safe and truthful customer service.
Published updated 2 min read
Generative Artificial Intelligence has burst into companies like a bull in a china shop: with great force and making a lot of noise. Suddenly, everyone wants a “ChatGPT” on their website to look after customers automatically.
It looks like the perfect solution: it does not sleep, does not charge overtime and answers instantly. But there is one small technical detail that most YouTube tutorials forget to mention: language models love to make things up.
In the industry, we call this “hallucinations”. And if your chatbot hallucinates with a customer, the legal and reputational problem is yours.
When the digital intern gets too creative
Imagine this real scenario: a customer opens the chat on your online shop and asks: “Are the model X trainers waterproof?” The AI, trained on the whole internet but with no specific instructions about your catalogue, wants to be helpful. Its probabilistic logic tells it that many trainers of that type are waterproof. So it replies: “Yes, absolutely! What's more, they come with a 3-year money-back guarantee if water gets in”.
The problem: they are not waterproof, and your company does not offer a 3-year guarantee. The result: you have just entered into a binding contract with the customer based on a lie. You have a guaranteed return, an angry customer and, quite possibly, a complaint to the consumer authorities.
AI does not “know”, AI “predicts”
It is essential to understand that a model such as GPT or Claude is not a database of truths. It is a word-prediction engine. Its goal is to write sentences that sound right, not necessarily sentences that are true.
If you connect an AI to your customer service without the right technical “guardrails”, you are handing a science-fiction writer a blank cheque to run your business.
The Oksigenia solution: RAG (intelligence with foundations)
At Oksigenia we do not implement chatbots; we implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
What does that mean in plain English? Instead of letting the AI improvise, we build an architecture in which the digital brain is forbidden to make things up. Before answering, our system forces the AI to consult only your approved documentation (your manuals, your returns policies, your actual stock).
- The customer asks.
- Our system looks for the answer in YOUR secure company files.
- The AI writes the answer using ONLY that information.
- If it does not know, it says “I don't know” and passes the query on to a human.
Automating requires expert supervision
The difference between “home-made automation” and professional automation is risk control. We set the model's “temperature” to remove unnecessary creativity and establish safety protocols so that the AI never goes off the corporate script.
Do not let a tool designed to help you destroy the trust you have worked so hard to build. AI is the future, yes; but only if it is given the limits of the present.
