Generally yes. Canadian misleading-representation law looks at what was said to the public, not what technology said it, and a chatbot script counts.
Short answer
Generally yes, in the same way a statement from an employee or a page on your own website can bind you — the law asks what representation was made to the public, not what technology produced it. The Competition Act's misleading-representation rules apply to a business “by any means whatever,” and a chatbot script is one of those means.
The federal Competition Act frames the rule around the representation itself: a person engages in reviewable conduct who, for the purpose of promoting a product or business interest, “by any means whatever… makes a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect.” (Competition Act, s.74.01(1)(a)) Nothing in that wording turns on whether a human, a webpage or a chatbot made the statement — the Competition Bureau's own discussion of AI and marketing makes the same point about scale rather than novelty: AI “eases the ability to scale” deceptive conduct, such as automating phone calls or other communications, rather than creating a new category of it. (Competition Bureau, Artificial intelligence and competition, discussion paper)
A well-drafted limitation-of-liability clause in your online terms of service caps what you owe if something goes wrong, provided it's clearly written and brought to the user's attention before they agreed — but courts won't enforce a clause that tries to contract out of statutory consumer protections, so a cap can't undo a false representation the Competition Act already treats as reviewable. (Treadstone Law, Terms of Service for Ontario Online Businesses)
Route anything a chatbot might say that reads as a binding offer — a price, a refund, a guarantee — through human review or an explicit escalation path, rather than letting the script freelance on it. The same reasoning applies on the other side of the counter: see who's responsible when AI-written copy overstates what your product does and whether an ad needs to disclose that AI wrote it.
See how accountability for an AI system's output actually gets assigned and reviewed.
