The liability question no one asked
Australian businesses using AI agents to negotiate deals, process orders, and communicate with customers are walking into a legal grey zone. If your AI sales agent offers a discount you did not authorise or commits to terms you would never approve, you may still be on the hook.
Simon Newcomb, partner and head of AI at Clayton Utz, put it plainly: "The AI agent is the business. There is no legal difference between the agent and the business."
That means everything the agent does, authorised or not, generally becomes the responsibility of the business deploying it.
Why this matters for sales teams
The risk is not theoretical. In Canada, Air Canada was ordered to compensate a customer after its chatbot incorrectly advised he could claim a bereavement fare retrospectively. The airline argued the chatbot was responsible for its own actions. The tribunal rejected that argument.
The ACCC confirmed similar consumer law obligations apply in Australia. A business can be liable for misleading information provided through AI chatbots, just as it would be for statements made by human employees.
For sales teams using AI agents to qualify leads, negotiate pricing, or handle customer queries, this creates a new comp risk. If the agent promises terms you cannot deliver, you may still be bound by them. If it misrepresents product capabilities, that is on you.
The Sydney angle
Relevance AI, the Sydney-based startup building no-code AI agent tools, raised a $37 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2025. The company reported 40,000 agents created on its platform in January 2025 alone, with customers including Activision, Qualified, and SafetyCulture.
Relevance AI's product is used across sales, recruitment, operations, marketing, and customer support workflows. The company emphasises SOC 2 Type II compliance and jurisdiction-specific hosting, which matter for enterprise procurement. But compliance does not solve the liability question.
If your AI agent is negotiating deals, you own what it says. Worth noting: there is no separate legal entity to blame when it goes off-script.