Digital Fairness Act: Your Chatbot Will Need a Way to Reach a Human
On 11 November two very different answers to AI shopping agents appeared on the same day. United Airlines changed its rules so that unauthorised third-party AI agents may no longer book, change or buy anything on behalf of a passenger. Agents can still search and show fares, but a person has to finish the purchase. A few hours later in Brussels, the European Commission proposed the Digital Fairness Act, a regulation that would replace the 2005 Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and, among much else, set rules for software that buys on behalf of consumers.
The headlines will focus on agents. For most companies that sell online in Bulgaria, though, the clause in the proposal that will matter first is a short one about something they already run: the customer-service chatbot.
Three short articles in a 72-page proposal
The text of the proposal is mostly about dark patterns, subscriptions, influencer marketing and pricing. Three articles deal directly with automation.
Article 25: a human in customer service. If a trader offers online customer service after a contract is concluded, it must make communication with a human being available when the consumer asks and when other means are not effective. The recital spells out how: online or otherwise, including email or messaging, in the language of the contract, free of charge and without undue delay during business hours. Authorities may take the size of the trader into account. Investment services are excluded.
Article 26: agents that sign contracts for the consumer. This applies to traders that make available to consumers an "automated system", defined as software that can take decisions with legal effects, including concluding contracts, without human intervention. On first use the consumer must actively choose one of three modes: confirm every purchase, confirm only some (for example above a maximum price or within a time limit), or confirm none. The choice must be confirmed on a durable medium and changeable at any time. If the operator of the agent is paid for proposing a contract, or has a conflict of interest, the agent must say so and ask for confirmation regardless of the mode chosen. Financial services are excluded.
Article 26(9): no forced agents. A trader may not design its website so that consumers have to use an automated system to access it or buy from it.
Article 27 adds a simplification for contracts concluded purely between machines on both sides: pre-contractual information can then be provided only in a machine-readable format.
What this means if you run an online shop
I expect very few Bulgarian online shops to offer their own buying agent in the next year, so Article 26 mostly concerns platforms, marketplaces and the companies building assistants such as ChatGPT or Gemini. My reading is that it matters to a typical shop in a different way. When a customer's agent comes to your checkout, the rules about what it may do on the customer's side are being written in Brussels, and your side of the policy is up to you. United chose a hard no. Walmart, according to PPC Land's coverage, published terms for agents in October. Many shops have not decided anything and do not know whether agents already visit.
Article 25 is different, because almost every shop already has the system it regulates. Chatbots in customer service were introduced precisely to reduce the number of conversations that reach a person. The proposal does not ban that. It says the bot cannot be a dead end after the customer has paid.
A hypothetical example. An appliance store answers after-sales questions through a chatbot on its website and in Viber. A customer whose washing machine arrived damaged writes three times, gets three links to the returns page and cannot find any way to reach a person. Today that is bad service. Under the proposed text, if the links are "not effective" for this problem and the customer asks for a human, it would be a breach.
Five checks you can do now
The proposal still has to be agreed by the European Parliament and the Council, and it would apply 12 months after entry into force. The details will change. The direction is clear enough to check a few things that are worth doing anyway.
- Find the human exit in your bot. Write "I want to talk to a person" in Bulgarian to your own chatbot, in every channel where it runs. Count how many messages it takes to get a name, a phone number or a handover. If the answer is "never", that is the first fix.
- Make the handover carry context. A transfer to a human that makes the customer explain everything again will feel like a dead end. Pass the conversation and the order number along.
- Log when the bot gives up. Add a simple tag for conversations where the customer asked for a person and record whether one answered and how fast. This is the evidence you would need if a complaint reaches a regulator, and it is also the best measure of where the bot is weak.
- Decide your stance on third-party agents. Look in your server logs and analytics for agent and AI-browser traffic, and decide in writing whether agents may only browse, may add to cart, or may complete orders. Whatever you choose, keep the normal checkout fully usable by a person, since the proposal would forbid making agents compulsory.
- If you plan your own buying assistant, design the three modes now. Confirm-all, confirm-some with a price cap and confirm-none, plus a clear label when a recommendation is paid. Retrofitting this later is more expensive than building it in.
On fines and timing
The fines are what most coverage leads with. Under the proposal, for widespread infringements Member States would have to set maximum fines of at least 4% of the trader's annual turnover in the countries concerned, and for cases the Commission investigates itself, the cap would be 6% of worldwide annual turnover. In my view, for a small shop in Plovdiv the realistic risk is a complaint to the consumer protection commission (КЗП), not a fine from Brussels.
That is why I would not treat this as an urgent compliance project. It is a good reason to look at your support bot from the customer's side. If you sell online and want to see where AI actually helps in customer service and where it needs a human behind it, that is the kind of work we describe on our e-commerce page.
The agent debate will take years. The bot that cannot hand over to a person is a problem you can find in ten minutes today.
