Your customer opens the chat on your online store with a question about their order. Until recently, they might not have even noticed right away whether an employee or a bot was responding. Starting August 2, 2026, that will change. That’s when the European transparency requirement for AI takes effect, and you’ll have to make it clear in advance that the customer is talking to an AI assistant.
What exactly is changing?
The rule comes from the European AI Regulation and is simple: if you use a chatbot or voicebot in your customer interactions, the customer must be informed of this at the outset. A visible notification such as “You are chatting with an AI assistant” is sufficient. No fine print, no ambiguity. In and of itself, that’s good news for trust, because people want to know who or what they’re dealing with.
Transparency exposes the weak spot
There’s just one downside. As long as a customer wasn’t sure whether they were talking to a human, they’d give a stuttering chatbot the benefit of the doubt. Once they know it’s a bot, that patience disappears. Expectations rise, and tolerance falls. If the bot then gets stuck on a question that falls just outside the script, the customer doesn’t feel helped—they feel brushed off. And that’s exactly where it goes wrong: the National Voice Monitor shows that only 12 percent of questions asked of a chatbot are answered to the customer’s satisfaction. Making it clear that it’s a bot only serves to highlight that 88 percent even more painfully.
The solution isn't less AI, but AI in the right place
The answer isn’t to just turn off your bot. AI excels at quick, simple tasks: where’s my package, what are the hours of operation, how do I return something? It’s perfectly fine for the customer to get that information from the bot. Things go wrong when you expect that same AI to also handle the difficult conversation—the customer with a complaint, the one who’s on the fence, or the case that’s just a little different. That’s when people want to speak to a human. The trick is in the handoff: automate what you can, and seamlessly transfer the call to an agent when it really matters.
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