Why most business chatbots make things up (and how to stop it)

A chatbot that invents a price is worse than no chatbot at all. The difference comes down to how it's grounded.

The failure mode everyone worries about is real: a customer asks what a brake job costs, the assistant guesses, and now you're arguing about a number nobody at your business ever quoted.

The fix is unglamorous. You constrain the assistant to a defined set of information about the business, and you give it explicit instructions to hand off rather than guess when a question falls outside that set.

Tested properly, this is more reliable than a busy human answering the phone mid-repair — because it never improvises to fill an awkward silence.