When an error reaches somebody

The case that settled the question

In 2024, a Canadian tribunal heard a claim from a passenger who had asked an airline's website assistant about bereavement fares. The assistant told him he could book now and apply for the reduced fare afterwards. That was wrong; the airline's actual policy said the opposite. He booked, applied, and was refused.

The airline's defence is the reason the case is worth knowing. It argued, in substance, that the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own statements. The tribunal rejected that without much difficulty: the airline was responsible for all the information on its website, whether it came from a static page or an assistant, and it was ordered to pay. The sum was small. The principle is not.

Read it as the general rule. If it went out under your name, it is yours. No disclaimer at the bottom of the window changes that, and no contract with a supplier changes it as far as the person you misled is concerned.

The four steps, in order

Something will get through eventually — a wrong figure in a report, an invented reference in a submission, a date that was never checked. The recovery is not special because AI was involved. It is the ordinary professional recovery, and the only unusual risk is the temptation to fix it quietly because the mistake feels embarrassing in a new way.

1. Tell the person affected, today. Before you have worked out how it happened, before you have an explanation, before you know whose fault it was. "The figure in section 4 is wrong; the correct figure is X; I am checking what else is affected" is a complete and adequate first message. Every regime and every relationship treats a same-day disclosure differently from a discovery.

2. Correct the record properly. Reissue the document with the correction visible, not a silently replaced file. If it was filed, follow the filing body's correction procedure. If it went to twenty people, it goes to the same twenty.

3. Find out what else is affected. This is the step people skip and it is where the real damage lives. If one figure came from an unchecked source, ask what else came from the same source, the same session, the same template. One error is rarely alone.

4. Log the cause, plainly. What tool, what task, what went in, what came out, what check failed. Not "AI error" — "the source was cited and not opened". The specific failure is the only useful record, because it tells you which step of your process to change.

What to say, and what not to

Say what happened and what you have done. Do not say "the AI made a mistake" as an explanation, because it is not one: the process that let an unchecked claim reach a client is the mistake, and that process was yours. A regulator, an editor and a client will all hear "the AI did it" as an admission that nobody was checking, which is a much worse admission than the error itself.

Equally, do not over-correct into concealment. Removing AI from an account of what happened, when it was involved, is a second and far more serious problem — and one that is usually discovered, because drafts, logs and colleagues exist.

The organisational half

If you run a team, decide these three things now rather than during an incident.

• Who is told, and how fast. A named person and a same-day expectation.
• That reporting early is safe. State it explicitly and then behave that way the first time it happens, because the first time is when the rule is actually set. A team that fears the report hides the error until a customer finds it.
• That the log is reviewed. Six entries reviewed once a quarter will tell you more about where your process is weak than any policy document, and they usually point at one step: something was relied on that nobody opened.

The consolation, and it is a real one

Errors of this kind are almost always failures of process, and processes can be fixed. An unopened citation, an unchecked total, a draft that went out without the two-minute specifics pass — each has a concrete remedy that costs minutes. That is a far better position than the errors of judgement people have always made, which are much harder to design out.