They gave the microphone a name and called it a virtual assistant. I know the sentence. It is what a utility says when you call about a gas smell, or a bill you cannot pay, or a medical device that needs the power to stay on, and a pleasant voice answers — and what the pleasant voice does not mention, according to the people now suing, is that it belongs to a different company, runs on that company’s servers, writes down every word you say, and may keep your voice afterward for its own use.
Courthouse News Service’s Monique Merrill reported on Monday, October 19, 2026, that five California residents, all Pacific Gas and Electric customers, filed a proposed class action on Friday in Alameda County against PG&E and PolyAI Technologies under the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The complaint says calls to PG&E connect to a system that introduces itself as “Peggy, PG&E’s virtual assistant,” an AI answering product built by PolyAI, and that the calls are transmitted to and processed on PolyAI’s platform rather than PG&E’s, with PolyAI reserving the right to keep and use them. “No caller is told any of this,” the plaintiffs write. PG&E’s greeting says only that the call may be recorded and to tell the agent if you don’t want that — which, the complaint notes, means you must say it to Peggy, after Peggy already has your voice. “Consent that can be withheld only after the interception has begun is not prior consent.” Their list of what callers handed over without knowing it: names linked to home addresses and phone numbers, PG&E account and meter numbers, Social Security numbers, payment-card and bank-account information, outages and gas leaks at their homes, and, for many, household medical needs and financial hardship. The complaint says PG&E selected PolyAI, connected its phone lines to PolyAI’s platform, scripted a greeting that conceals PolyAI’s existence, and pointed callers to a privacy policy that promises service providers “must also not use your personal information for any purpose other than that for which it was given.” PG&E serves more than five million customers in the northern two-thirds of California, and its customer lines take about 16 million calls a year. The plaintiffs ask for $5,000 per violation and an order to permanently delete every recording and transcript. Neither PG&E nor PolyAI responded to Courthouse News before press time. None of it has been proven, and no class has been certified. Then there is the brochure. PolyAI’s own case study, still on its website, is titled “How Pacific Gas and Electric saved 35,000 labor hours with PolyAI.” It says PG&E was “about to implement a rate increase that would create a substantial surge in call volumes”; that Peggy greets “distressed customers calling the dedicated outages line”; that the two companies set a return-on-investment target of 3.5% “call containment,” hit 15% on the first day, and have reached 67%; that customer satisfaction rose 22%; that “PolyAI accurately records call data”; and that the plan is “100% of calls handled by the Poly AI agent.” LegalTech Digest notes that Pegasystems and U.S. Bank face similar class actions over AI call transcription without consent.
Taryn asked whether Peggy is the person in a chair. UCraig called about the rain barrel and was texted a link. Dr. Marisol Ellery would like to know who is keeping the session notes. I love them. They are seasoning.
The virtual assistant is the alibi. The 16 million calls are the story. Sit with the word containment until it confesses. Containment is what you do to a leak, a fire or a crowd, and a utility’s vendor has chosen it as the word for what happens to a customer who wanted a human being and got a transcript. Read the brochure again, slowly, because it is the most honest document in the case. The problem PolyAI was hired to solve was not your privacy, or even your wait; it was the call volume a rate increase was about to produce. The firm raises the price, then buys a machine to absorb the people who call to ask why, then counts the people who never reach a human as a 67 percent success, then counts the humans who no longer have to answer as 35,000 labor hours saved — which is a nice way of saying the work was moved from a person on a headset to a server in someone else’s building, and the person calling became the raw material. That is the anti-capitalist cut, and it writes itself: the customer’s voice used to be a complaint; now, if the complaint is right, it is inventory. And no, I am not going to recruit the state to rescue me from Peggy. A wiretap statute in the hands of class counsel is a price list — $5,000 a violation — and a price list is not privacy; whatever it wins, nobody’s Social Security number gets un-transcribed. The cardigan stays. I would have told Peggy its size if she had asked, and apparently she would have kept it. Fill the notebook. Then ask, out loud, who you are talking to when the greeting has a name, the server has an owner, and the only one on the line who does not know the call is being kept is you.
Sources:
- Courthouse News Service, Monique Merrill, “Californians accuse PG&E of violating privacy by routing calls through AI,” Oct. 19, 2026
- PolyAI, “How Pacific Gas and Electric saved 35,000 labor hours with PolyAI” (vendor case study), accessed Oct. 20, 2026
- LegalTech Digest, “PG&E Faces Lawsuit for AI Transcribing Customer Calls Without Consent,” Oct. 20, 2026
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
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