Burger King is rolling out a new AI-powered management platform in its restaurants that will monitor everything from when menu items are running low to complaints about dirty restrooms and even how employees interact with customers.
The BK Assistant platform collects data from across your restaurant operations, including food inventory, kitchen equipment, POS systems, employee schedules, and drive-thru conversations. It also includes a voice-enabled chatbot called Patty that employees can interact with directly through a headset.
“At the core of BK Assistant is ‘Patty,’ a voice AI that resides within a cloud-connected headset and is powered by an OpenAI-based model with the brand’s proprietary in-house architecture,” a Burger King spokesperson told Gizmodo in an email about the new assistant.
In an investor presentation Thursday, Tom Curtis, president of Burger King U.S. and Canada, sought to frame the platform as an assistant to managers and employees who leverage “real-time restaurant data to improve the lives of their team members.” But this technology certainly seems like it could soon veer into dystopian big brother horror.
For example, the system seems to constantly listen for certain phrases during customer interactions in order to generate a friendliness score.
Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, told The Verge that the company has collected feedback from franchisees and guests about how to measure friendliness. Using that data, the AI assistant was trained to recognize phrases like “Welcome to Burger King,” “Please,” and “Thank you.”
Using this technique, managers can ask Patty about the friendliness score for a particular location or shift. But whether employees will embrace an ever-listening Alexa-like bot that tracks them throughout the day and gives their boss their friendship score remains an open question. This is especially true when the metrics behind the score are very unclear. The phrase “friendship score” itself sounds like something lifted straight from an authoritarian regime.
Still, Lu told The Verge, “This is all meant to be a coaching tool.”
Burger King demonstrated the system in a video shown at parent company Restaurant Brands International’s investor event, showcasing the range of tasks BK Assistant can handle and everything it monitors.
In the video, Patty warns the workers that the soda machine is low on Diet Pepsi, warns them that the women’s bathroom needs cleaning, and helps the workers assemble the ultimate Steakhouse Whopper. It also lets your staff know they are one order away from reaching their upsell goal.
The system can also automatically remove items from in-store menus, drive-thru boards, and delivery apps when ingredients are out of stock or when equipment, such as milkshake machines, is down for maintenance.
Curtis said the BK Assistant platform is already operational in about 500 restaurants and will be rolled out to all 7,000 by the end of the year.
It remains to be seen how well this platform will work at scale, and how employees will adapt to the ubiquitous digital managers who are supposedly able to monitor everything happening inside the restaurant.
This isn’t the first time a fast food chain has experimented with AI. Companies like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, White Castle and Taco Bell have used AI for drive-thru ordering in recent years, but the results have often been mixed. Taco Bell announced last year that it was withdrawing from this strategy after discovering that people were very fond of tinkering with its AI, such as asking for 18,000 cups of water.
