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PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Nick Evanson

App promising a universal shopping experience automated with AI actually used a small army of human workers in the Philippines and Romania instead

Philippines Romania the US Department of Justice
An image of a person lying on a couch, buying clothing on a phone shopping app.

In the world of technology, exaggerating the capabilities of a product is pretty much the norm. But when one app company managed to raise millions of dollars in investments on the promise that it would be fully automated via AI, the US Department of Justice charged its former CEO with fraud because it turns out that the actual 'AI' was in fact several hundred call centre workers instead.

The company in question is Nate, which started in 2018 and rapidly amassed over $50 million in investments, according to TechCrunch. It did this because the company's product, a universal shopping phone app, was claimed to use AI to fully automate the whole buying process.

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