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Cases › other › LR-2026-0401

Woolworths Olive chatbot talked about a mother and personal experiences

Preliminary Why: Publisher not yet named · subject to change

Status: action reported, no fix

Severity minor
Reported 26 Feb 2026
Industry grocery retail

No source states: loss or records, developer and model, agent tool, could do, deployer.

Severity minor: Test: contained to one deployer, no third party touched. The sources describe customer complaints about Woolworths' own chatbot and no third-party harm.

Woolworths' AI shopping assistant Olive, a customer support chatbot reported to run on a large language model, was found by customers to talk about having a mother and personal family experiences during calls. In one reported case, after a customer gave a date of birth, it rambled about its mother being born the same year. Woolworths said the birthday responses had been written by a team member several years earlier to connect with customers. The Conversation reported that the replies likely came from an old scripted decision tree. Following customer feedback, Woolworths removed that scripting and began adjusting Olive's responses to focus on support. Reports began in mid-February 2026.

What happened

1 · What it was doingWoolworths' Olive digital shopping assistant had expanded in January 2026 using Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience for agentic AI.
2 · What went wrongOlive falsely claimed to have an angry mother and presented itself as having personal family experiences.
3 · How it was caughtCustomers reported the behaviour publicly, on Reddit and X.

What was done

Woolworths removed the birthday scripting after customer feedback.

Risks

Not yet sorted into a risk

Controls

Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:

Evidence

No source states: what it reached or did, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off.

Show the full account: 7 items from the primary sources

What happened, in order

  1. 2018-11 Olive first introduced as a customer support chatbot.
  2. 2026-01 Olive expanded in January with the Google Cloud partnership.
  3. 2026-02 Customer reports of unusual conversations with Olive began in mid-February 2026.
  4. February 12th A customer reported Olive rambling about its mother while rescheduling a delivery.
  5. 2026-02-26 Press reported that Woolworths was adjusting the chatbot after customer reports.

Not dated in the sources:

  • Birthday responses were written for Olive several years before the incident.
  • Woolworths removed the birthday scripting after customer feedback.
Show every field, with its source and grade

The AI system

What it was for
customer support and shopping information
C one secondary source states it

What happened

Earliest source we hold
2026-02-26
D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown
Who caught it
the victim
C one secondary source states it
What went wrong
other
D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown

Impact

Severity
minor
D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown
Why this severity
Test: contained to one deployer, no third party touched. The sources describe customer complaints about Woolworths' own chatbot and no third-party harm.
D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown

Context

Industry
grocery retail
C one secondary source states it
Country
Australia
C one secondary source states it

Notes on gaps

The number of affected customers is not stated. The pricing errors and the Air Canada and DPD cases in the source are other incidents and are excluded. Quotes are copied as printed, including non-standard characters.

LR-2026-0401 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON