AI-assisted complaints to the UK’s Financial Ombudsman Service can be longer, less accurate and slower to resolve, prompting staff to call consumers to find the real dispute. The figures are striking, though they come from a small review and should not be mistaken for a population-wide measure.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Chief ombudsman James Dipple-Johnstone told the Financial Times that the worst example he had encountered contained 39 references, of which only two were correct. In a small batch reviewed earlier this year, as many as a third of replies to initial assessments appeared to have been written or heavily shaped by AI, according to Resultsense’s account of the FT interview.
Some submissions now exceed 200 pages. The Ombudsman says checking irrelevant or invented legal references takes time away from resolving the actual complaint. Its response is often to speak directly with the consumer. The service accepts that AI can help people set out clearer arguments; the difficulty is separating a useful account from a document that buries the point.
Why it matters
The FOS received 110,500 cases in the first six months of 2026/27, including 57,000 in the second quarter. That is the service’s caseload, not a count of AI-written complaints. The FOS links the increase partly to wider AI use and partly to cost-of-living pressures, so the contribution of AI remains uncertain.
The practical tension is familiar: tools can make it easier to submit a complaint, while making each one more laborious to assess. When a caseworker has to check a thicket of citations before reaching the consumer’s actual problem, a longer submission is not necessarily a stronger one.
Our read
This is a useful warning, not a case against using AI to explain a grievance. A clear, accurate account can help; a 200-page citation hunt can do the opposite. The FOS’s approach of calling people to establish the dispute is refreshingly low-tech, if rather less glamorous than deploying another tool.
For consumers, the sensible test is whether AI has made the complaint clearer and kept its references accurate. For firms, answering the substance plainly may be more useful than batting back every dubious citation individually.
What to watch
- Whether the FOS publishes a larger review showing how often AI-written material appears in complaints.
- Whether the service’s new power to dismiss complaints affects how it handles lengthy submissions.
- How the FOS manages its existing caseload, including almost 100,000 motor-finance complaints on hand, as described in the report.
Discussion spark: Should complaints handlers treat AI-assisted submissions as a reason to ask for a clearer account, or should the burden be on the complainant to keep their evidence concise and accurate?
Sources and evidence
- Financial Ombudsman phones consumers over AI-written claims – Resultsense (27 October 2026, 09:37 UTC)
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