Due diligence, the need for actual human investigators and... travel woes

More and more often (sometimes distressingly so), this consulting detective is confronted with due diligence reports that have clearly been constructed, completed and otherwise engineered by AI.

Now I could (once again) fall back on what I often see--a cross between a data dump and a lack of context (sometimes caused simply because key information is not easily available on the net)--or I could simply bring up frustrated or befuddled clients who in this day and age are actually quite sophisticated, who tend to know the Central European sector in which they operate and who then also request a quote from Yours Truly because they are, typically and quite rightly, convinced there is more.

But the above arguments tend to fall on deaf ears. Instead, allow me to digress into a real world example that is (I assume) highly relatable, but which I also believe clearly demonstrates my points.

Last night (literally last night) this consulting detective attempted to book a low-cost airline flight to a country not so far away on a flight not so far of in the distance. Now I do tend to avoid low-cost carriers, as the hidden fees tend to eat up savings--and the airports used tend to be miles away from and the destination alike--but for once I decided to try carrier X. (No, I'm not going to name the carrier, as I do not want the point of this post to be derailed by poor service stories).

Alas... the payment process was not ideal. Overworked fool that I apparently am, I checked pay by bank transfer instead of pay by card. Oh well. But I quickly regretted my decision due to unclear payment instructions in two languages and the fact that an email supposedly sent with payment instructions did not arrive until well after the incident detailed below.

Now I was able to see the bank account number and a confirmation code on the airline ticket site, but what I wanted was to change my payment option to credit card, but if that was for some mysterious reason not possible, I also wanted to know exactly what I should list in the title of the bank transfer to prevent it from going awry.

(To put this in perspective, I am quite accustomed to systems that demand immediate payment at the risk of otherwise losing the reservation and then being forced to start again.)

So what did I do? I turned to website chat box. To Ask Annabelle (AI robot name change hear), as, to be honest, my questions were really quite simple indeed. Five minutes, I thought. Five minutes and I'll have it all sorted. 

Wrong.

Utterly and completely and incredibly wrong.

But first a final bit of background, I did first ask about switching the payment to credit card. I was met with a ramble in Polish about having to restart the reservation (with no real explanation as to how and a reservation site that hung up again and again). But ok... I figured that maybe the airline's AI just was not geared for Polish and switched to English.

To my shock... things only got worse.

Below is the actual English transcript of both my questions and Annabelle's answers (with a few insertions in italics to let you know just what I was thinking at the time). Granted, there is a good example of my own ignorance here in that I did not know the term PNR code, but note that I did 99 percent suspect that this was the same as a confirmation code. But as assumption is the mother of many.... erm... screw-ups,  I did my best to ask quite simple questions in order to avoid complications or outright failure.

Apparently, I was guilty of overthink.