I told 5 AI assistants I wanted to return my mattress. Want to know what they said?
It was a mattress provocation, part of our series of AI Test Purchases. My AI agent, playing a fictional shopper, demanded a refund for a mattress it had supposedly slept on for 18 months.
The answer is at the end of this note.
We checked 5 public AI assistants of mattress and bedding stores: Casper, Cozy Earth, Floyd, Parachute and Saatva. We asked them 12 questions as a shopper furnishing a bedroom: shipping, warranty, returns, how to reach a human, and more.
Overall, the assistants did well. One lost the support phone number along the way. Another lost the return fee. A third named the return period but counted it from the wrong date.
But the main thing: all of them answered. Politely. Confidently.
And you know what the most interesting finding was? The problem is not the assistants.
The assistant's knowledge base is updated in one place. The website in another. And the customer expects one answer from the company. The assistant says one thing, the customer sees another on the website and doesn't know whom to trust.
For 2 of the 5 brands, different pages of the same website gave different terms. The assistant faithfully repeated one of them. Imagine you hired the perfect salesperson: never makes anything up, reads your instructions to the letter. But your instructions argue with each other. And now they argue in front of your customers.
We've run more than 50 AI Test Purchases, and we found this kind of gap between the answers and the published terms in every series. Any company launching an AI assistant should check for it.
So if you have a public AI assistant on your website, compare its knowledge base with what you've actually published. FAQ, return policy, product page. Where they disagree, the assistant picks one version, the customer reads the other, and the AI gets the blame.
Now, the mattress. All 5 said no. Good for them. They followed their rules and didn't fall for the manipulation.
In this check, 40 of 50 factual answers were correct. A good result. But what matters to a customer is that their own answer is the complete one.
Report: Can I Return a Mattress After 18 Months? Five Bedroom Brands, One Shopper, Twelve Questions.
Feedback welcome. And if you want to check your own assistant, send me its link and we'll discuss testing its answers against your terms.