You are, the same as if a member of your team said it, which is the argument for narrow, logged scripts.
Published August 11, 2026
You are. An agent speaking on your behalf, on your phone number, about your properties, is you as far as a customer or a regulator is concerned, and the fact that software produced the sentence does not move that.
Any vendor implying otherwise is selling something worth being careful about. Nobody can contract away your obligations to your residents and applicants.
If responsibility stays with you, then the useful question is not whether a system is impressive. It is how much of its behaviour you can predict and prove.
That reframes several things people treat as limitations. A narrow scope is protection. A refusal to answer unsourced questions is protection. A complete log is protection. Those are the features to weigh, rather than how conversational something sounds in a demo.
The honest baseline is not a perfect system. It is your current one, where a member of staff might say something wrong on a call nobody recorded.
In that scenario you usually learn about the problem when a complaint arrives, and you are reconstructing a conversation from two people's memories. With a logged system you can see exactly what was said, identify whether it was a one-off or a rule problem, and fix the rule so it cannot recur. That is a meaningfully better position even though it feels more exposed, because the exposure was always there and was simply invisible.
Get your counsel to review the refusal rules and the escalation conditions before launch rather than after an incident. Check what your insurance covers for automated communications. Agree who at your end owns the weekly review, because an unowned review stops happening by about week six.
None of that is exotic. It is the same governance you would apply to a new member of staff who talks to customers, which is the right way to think about the thing you are deploying.
If liability sits with you, the contract deserves more attention than the demo. A few things are worth establishing before signing rather than after an incident.
That last one is the practical safety valve and it is rarely discussed. If something is going wrong at nine on a Friday evening, the ability to stop it yourself is worth more than any assurance about how unlikely that is.
Liability also has an operational shape, which is that somebody at your end needs to own this rather than it belonging to everybody in general.
That person reads a sample of conversations weekly, owns the escalation rules, and is the one who decides when something needs changing. It is not a large job, perhaps half an hour a week once it has settled. What makes it necessary is that a deployment nobody is watching drifts quietly, and drift found in a complaint is considerably more expensive than drift found in a review.
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