Patagonia lawsuit raises thorny GenAI data issues

This lawsuit only directly involves Patagonia and Talkdesk, but how the AI programs leverage accessed data is very much in the picture.

What’s alleged

Talkdesk captures all customer service conversations from Patagonia customers and business partners, transcribes them and uses unspecified AI programs to “analyze callers’ words to determine what the caller is talking about and how the caller is feeling,” according to the California filing. “Neither Talkdesk nor Patagonia disclose to individuals that their conversations are being intercepted, listened to, recorded, and used by Talkdesk. They also do not obtain customer consent for Talkdesk to intercept, listen to, record, and use the contents of the call. This is illegal under California law.”

The lawsuit refers to one of the Talkdesk AI products, Copilot, which it describes as a GenAI “assistant that listens, guides, and assists contact-center agents during customer interactions. For example, Copilot will automatically suggest relevant responses to agents in chats, emails, calls, and texts based on the content of customers’ communications. Talkdesk saves all this information in the cloud and builds an interaction history, which enables companies to keep track of customers’ prior conversations— even if those conversations occurred in a different medium. All of this data is stored on Talkdesk’s servers.”