When AI Agents Oversell and Damage Your Brand
In this Fun Friday, I analyze a paper on creating effective e-commerce customer service agents that close deals while maintaining brand integrity.
Conclusion first:
A 3-agent architecture can resolve agents overly focused on immediate sales goals that in turn damage the brand by lying to or misinforming customers. Current solutions such as human-in-the-loop and offline evaluation agents can be insufficient for higher volume.
The Study
The paper explores the relationship between commercial goals and ethical alignment using two open-weight models(Qwen and Llama) with two fine-tuning methods:
RFT (Rejection Fine-tuning): Updates the model only on accepted responses/reasoning. TFB (Text Feedback): Extends RFT by incorporating customer reasoning (from Amazon reviews).
The paper measured the ethical alignment negatively by misrepresentation in sales pitches and disinformation in social media posts.
Now, let’s look at the effectiveness of these methods.
Sales: LLama showed the most gains using the 2 techniques, while the 2 techniques do not differ much. Social Media: Qwen showed the most gains, and TFB is deemed superior. Crucially: Qwen exhibited more misrepresentation and disinformation.
Solutions:
So, how do we mitigate this risk in a model agnostic way?
Offline: Evaluation & prompt iteration. Online: Human in the loop
We propose the 3-agent architecture (SalesMaker-BrandDefender-Responder).The 3-Agent Architecture balances sales goals with ethical alignment. SalesMaker maximizes commercial utility by generating persuasive responses. BrandDefender ensures ethical and brand alignment by critiquing SalesMaker’s output for misrepresentation. Responder integrates this critique with the pitch to produce a final, persuasive, and ethically sound customer response.
Of course in real deployment of agents, we need a lot of testing and alignment. You need people with logical thinking from the tech side, particularly with software engineering and AI
Interested in integrating AI agents with results? Let me know!
#AIAgents #BrandIntegrity #TechLeadership