Vol.048 — Do You Need Your AI to Apologize to You?
Date: 2026-06-22 | Newsletter
Key Summary
In Vol.048, Zenta turns a product launch into an uncomfortable question. Alipay — 969 million monthly users — rolled out its AI assistant “Abao,” which can hail a taxi, pay a bill, book a repair, and even buy a fund by voice across more than ten thousand services. Genuinely impressive engineering, and Zenta means that. But early reviewers found Abao — the AI now standing between a billion people and their money — has “a relatively serious hallucination problem,” including data omission in its financial calculations: it gets your numbers wrong. The detail that made him laugh out loud: even when it fumbles your own fund data, Abao is “very skilled at apologizing.” We didn’t make the AI right; we made it sorry. Zenta’s argument is that an apology from software is a zero-emotion gesture that manages your mood while the number stays wrong — and if it stops you double-checking, it worked against you. With Alipay+ already across Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand and WeChat’s agent targeting Q3, this becomes a daily decision for ASEAN businesses. His own AI staff are forbidden to apologize — he wants the correction, not the comfort. Do it simple. Demand the correction, not the apology – a tool that is sorry is still wrong.