I taught an AI to schedule tenant repairs and it booked a plumber for 3 AM

Set up a smart assistant to auto-book maintenance calls last Tuesday, but it misread the time zone input and scheduled Mr. Rooter to show up at 3 AM. The plumber actually rang the doorbell, tenant was not amused, and I spent the whole morning explaining to everyone that no, my building is not haunted. Has anyone else had an AI scheduling tool just completely miss basic context like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

kelly.nora21d ago

My Alexa once scheduled a dentist for 2 AM and I woke up to a very confused receptionist.

ryan_ellis20d ago

Did you check what timezone the AI was pulling from, or did it just guess based on the IP address? Because @kelly.nora’s dentist story is funny but at least that was a wake up call, not a dude with a plunger at your door. I had a similar thing happen with a vendor portal once, it kept converting everything to UTC and I didn’t catch it until a vendor showed up for a “9 PM” meeting at 9 AM. The real kicker is these tools never ask for a simple confirmation before they act, they just book it and hope for the best. You basically have to babysit the damn thing for the first week or it’ll pull stuff like this.