Honest at the front desk

We thought about this a lot before changing it.

The old rule was reactive: if a customer asked whether they were talking to a bot, the chat would say yes. The new rule is the opposite. The first message of every conversation identifies the chat as the business's AI assistant, in whatever language the customer wrote in. The customer doesn't have to suspect anything to find out.

Three things forced the change. The realistic customer is a tourist scanning a QR code on a table; they've never seen a customer chat before; they assume they're talking to a server. They share what they'd share with a server — payment intent, dietary restrictions, sometimes more. Trust gets damaged when they later figure out it was a bot. Safety drops because they wouldn't have shared the same things with a bot they knew was a bot. And the EU AI Act mandates disclosure for commercial bots; California's SB-1001 already does. The QR code is in Batumi, not the EU, but the tourist is often an EU citizen protected by GDPR even when the operator is outside it.

So the chat says what it is. Plainly. In the customer's language. Before the conversation starts.

We thought we'd lose conversions. We didn't. Customers ask anyway, the way they always did. We just don't pretend they can't tell.