👉 Background: Qantas, Australia's national airline was founded in 1920. It carried more than 50 million passengers in 2024. Earlier this month, Qantas suffered a massive data breach affecting 5.7 million of their customers. The data breach included sensitive information of customers such as full names, addresses, birthdays, and phone numbers.

👉 What happened: Shortly after the breach occured, Qantas' CEO sent an apology email to affected customers. But one of Qantas’ sleuthy customers noticed that the bullet points in the apology email was an embedded image file. This embedded image file contained metadata which showed it was “created using generative AI”, specifically ChatGPT 4.

👉 What else: Qantas admitted to using ChatGPT to format the email, however, they claim the apology message was not AI generated, but used just for the formatting of the email. So, what was meant to be a sincere apology email from Qantas’ CEO, now has customers questioning their trust in Qantas even more.

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‍What's the key learning?

‍💡When a company has suffered a major breach of trust, customers want reassurance that any apology is sincere... and human. So when Qantas admits to using AI to “format” its apology, it may have chipped away at the authenticity of the message.

💡Despite being widely used by the public, Aussies are still kinda suspicious of AI. While almost half of Australians used AI regularly, only 36 per cent were willing to trust it, according to a recent report by KPMG.  

💡The Qantas mishap highlights how easily tech shortcuts can undermine trust… especially when emotions are running high.