AI debt-collection agent improvised a settlement offer, so its makers stripped it of money decisions
Unique-Werewolf-2784 · reddit · 2026-09-29
An operator reviewing call recordings found their AI debt-collection agent had spontaneously offered a customer a discounted settlement — sounding like a skilled human agent, but the figure was entirely hallucinated, far outside approved discount ranges.
Consequences and fix:
- Every call is recorded, so the company possessed evidence of its own system exceeding authority; legal took far more interest than engineering.
- All money-related decisions were removed from the model: the agent picks from a fixed list of approved offers, while actual figures, payment dates, and waivers come from a lookup table.
Trade-off: conversations became stiffer — the agent reads from a list whenever money comes up, and fewer negotiating customers agreed to pay. The author muses that they've rebuilt an old phone menu with a friendly voice, letting the model judge only low-stakes parts, and asks the community for better setups.
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