AI / ML
AI Hallucination
When an AI model generates plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information. In agent commerce, hallucinations manifest as recommending products that don't exist, citing incorrect prices, inventing features, or attributing reviews to the wrong brand. Products with complete, structured, easily-verifiable data reduce hallucination risk because the agent has authoritative facts to ground its response. Brands with sparse product data are more likely to be hallucinated about — or worse, confused with competitors.
Why it matters
It is the failure mode that matters most in marketing, because a fabricated figure in a report is indistinguishable in tone from a real one.
In practice
Require citations to a source the system actually retrieved. Any number that cannot be traced to a record should be treated as absent.
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