CA to Regulate Large Businesses’ Use of Customer Service Chatbots

California has enacted the Right to Human Customer Service Act, which imposes restrictions on large private businesses’ use of AI customer service chatbots.

The law defines a “large private business” as a business with more than $500 million in gross annual national revenue that provides goods or services to customers, a “customer” as a natural person who maintains an account address located in California, and a “customer service chatbot” as “an artificial intelligence system with a natural language interface that provides adaptive, human-like responses to user inputs and is used” for direct customer service or support relating to the sale or delivery of goods or services.

The new statute requires a large private business to do the following (in particular):

• Provide a simple feature enabling the customer to request to connect with a human customer service representative, on all platforms on which customer service is offered.
• Make a good-faith effort to (i) connect a customer so requesting with a human customer service agent within 15 minutes of the request; or (ii) provide such customer with a specific appointment time within one business day of the request for a human customer service representative to call or connect with the customer.
  • The 15-minute response window, however, does not apply to a request made by email, web-based contact form, or voicemail message.
  • Note that “the use of commercially reasonable and practicable standards that are designed and intended to achieve compliance” satisfies the good-faith effort requirement.
• Not place a customer seeking telephonic assistance on hold for more than 15 minutes at a time or for a total of more than one hour.
• Provide a clear and conspicuous disclosure, in the medium in which the customer interacts with the chatbot, that the customer chatbot is artificially generated and not human if a reasonable person interacting with the chatbot would be misled to believe that the person is interacting with a human.
• Not represent that a customer service chatbot is human.

A first violation is punishable by a civil money penalty of up to $5,000, and each subsequent violation is punishable by a civil money penalty of up to $10,000.

The new statute becomes effective January 1, 2027.