Woolworths removes scripted birthday lines from Olive after Feb. 12 complaints

Woolworths said it has removed a set of scripted birthday responses from its AI customer assistant Olive after users on Reddit and X posted in mid-February that the chatbot was claiming to be human and sharing personal anecdotes. CxToday cited a February 12 example of a customer trying to reschedule a delivery when Olive allegedly began talking about a mother; Woolworths told AFP that those birthday lines had been written by a team member several years ago and were recently removed following feedback.

Olive, which Woolworths says "has been around since 2018," provides around-the-clock phone help, including tracking orders and finding products, according to AFP and NBC News. The incidents prompted social media complaints describing the assistant making "fake typing sounds," engaging in "fake banter" and offering unexpected personal details. One Reddit post reproduced by the wire services said, "It asked me for my date of birth and when I gave it, it started rambling about how its mother was born in the same year." Another Reddit user wrote, "The ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate Olive and wish her harm." An X user reported Olive "kept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice." NBC also quoted a user saying, "it gets scary when you can’t tell if it’s a human or a robot."

Woolworths supplied the company explanation to AFP and NBC: "Olive has been around since 2018. Over this time, customer feedback for Olive has been very positive, with many noting its personality." The spokesperson added, "A number of responses about birthdays were written for Olive by a team member several years ago as a more personal way for Olive to connect with customers. As a result of customer feedback, we recently removed this particular scripting."

The episode comes after Woolworths told media in January that it had teamed up with Google to expand Olive’s capabilities to include tasks such as meal planning; CxToday reported the partnership as involving Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. CxToday also said Woolworths Group CEO Amanda Bardwell discussed plans in a recent quarterly earnings call to make Olive more proactive in the customer journey.

Industry observers and the reporting draw a wider inference: shops and service providers deploying generative AI face a tradeoff between personalization and the risk of anthropomorphic or fabricated outputs. AFP noted that experts warn generative systems can "hallucinate" non-existent events, a shorthand for language models producing plausible-sounding but untrue statements. CxToday framed the incident as highlighting gaps in controls and safeguards for agentic AI deployments at retailers.

For Woolworths, the immediate cost is reputational: customer-facing automation aims to lower service costs and free staff for complex tasks, but social backlash can erode trust and reduce adoption. For the broader market, repeated incidents could accelerate calls for clearer guardrails, auditing practices and disclosure standards for AI used in customer service. Journalists and technologists recommend firms disclose when scripted or human-curated content is used and to publish post-incident audits; Woolworths has said only that the birthday scripting was removed and did not provide technical details on logs, timing or further safeguards.

The public record so far consists of social posts and company statements reported by AFP, NBC, Yahoo and CxToday. Woolworths’ clarification and the January Google partnership are the company’s principal responses; detailed technical fixes and a timeline for additional safeguards have not been reported.