Burger King already was doing this at their drive thru to check if employees were saying keywords like "you rule" and determining the customer's mood. Also saving a recording of the interaction for who knows how long. BobDaHacker got into their system with an auth bypass and exposed it[1]. It's very draconian.
The screenshots of the backend “Assistant” in [1] pretty much seem like this is what Burger King is expanding upon. It seemed already able to determine out-of-stocks and was gathering cleanliness data for the bathrooms.
It also sounds like they’re basically confirming [1] as well out loud — “He adds that the company is currently testing the AI drive-thru technology in fewer than 100 restaurants.”
Of note, I recall back in the mid-2000s there was a swing-down device near the order packing zone in the Burger King kitchen and it had a screen and a keypad on it and was labeled the “Manager’s Assistant” (or maybe “Kitchen Minder”?) device. From what I understood it was tracking production, providing reminders to check the bathroom, and providing projected order volume information.
Can they use AI to check if their employees actually assemble the burger before slapping it into the box? I don't know why burger king and mcdonalds have this problem when every other burger shop manages it fine. Basically what I'm saying is if burger king management is concerned about customer experience, or even if they don't give a shit and just want AI on their resume, there are better approaches..
Burger King is not in the "too big to fail" category. Writing letters to people in the company would probably be pretty effective here. Even if you don't eat at Burger King, when AI takes over all software jobs, you might end up making more money by working there someday. Protecting your interests is important.
> Burger King is not in the "too big to fail" category.
How the hell have they survived this long. It’s consistently been the worst fast food burger restaurant I’ve been across the various states I’ve lived.
I know things are bad in tech, but it's still about 50% people stoned out their gourd everytime I go to a chain drive through. These chains are not in a position to meaningfully enforce how the interaction happens, they are barely in a position to meaningfully enforce that the worker is sober enough to form a sentence.
Yup. It is mildly funny how we were full steam ahead for building one too until, suddenly, investors realized it could wipe out their other investments..and then it kinda stopped. Instead, Gartner is listing universal orchestrator ( or whatever the official name was ) as a path forward.
I always thought we were a step away from Manna when we had voice-based picking in warehouses. Guess we’ve finally taken it all the way to the actual full-on Manna.
This is very stupid. No one wants this. People don't like false sincerity. Even when we know that it's someones job to be nice, we appreciate when it feels genuine.
If you want people to genuinely be nice, give them reasons. Make them happy. Help them stay motivated. Otherwise you cheapen "please" and "thank you" even more than is already the case and get zero value out of it because no one will appreciate it knowing that it's forced.
A world where everyone says "please" and "thank you" isn't a better world.
When I used to do a lot of phone tech support and my employer hired a company to do customer satisfaction surveys. I got a 0 out of 5 on several occasions with the comment "Stop calling me at this phone number, I don't know who you people are.". Someone gave the wrong phone number to the survey company and they hadn't called the customer I worked with.
I was told by my managers there was nothing they could do about it because nobody was allowed to edit the total scores or remove obviously bad records because someone might do that for the wrong reasons. So I just had to live with it.
I have it in my head that a lot of these problems core issue is a lack of faith / effort in creating good front line management. At a food place a good front line manager keeps everyone going, the mood light, and can really make all the difference in the world, but rather lazy middle, upper managers, would slap some survey or metrics or AI on things.
In that way it's no really an AI issue, just the typical bad management issue.
>Because it’s integrated with the new cloud point-of-sale system, the AI assistant will also alert managers if a machine is down for maintenance or when an item is out of stock. “Within 15 minutes, the entire ecosystem will remove it from stock
If you're out of fries ... taking 15 minutes to reflect that on the menu doesn't seem very fast.
Sadly, I think this is only the beginning. Once video monitoring becomes cheap and easy we will see "shirts folded per hour", "distance swept per annum", "steps deviating from optimum path between van and front door", "customers approached per shift" etc
I used to work for a company that did "Electronic Monitoring", the nice name for monitoring people with ankle bracelets. One thing that never ceased to amaze me is how almost everyone I talked to about it or showed the device (I wore one occasionally for testing purposes) assumed or asked there was a way to shock the person wearing it.
I guess on the face of it that's not a crazy thing to think but I was always struck by how "normal" people seemed to think that would be. Maybe it's TV/Movies that have done something like that and make people think it's a real thing but more importantly (disgustingly?) that it's perfectly reasonable.
Well, you may not like it, but BK probably have done their research and found that employees positive interaction with customers equals more sales.
Yes, there are probably a thousand other actions they could take to increase number of sold meals, but my guess this one is easy pickings, i.e. cost vs return.
Around where I live (Chicago suburbs), BK restaurants are closing often. Even new ones, open for a year or so close down (many buildings are turned into dispensaries for some reason). Their issues are deeper than how employees greet customers.
Companies like Burger King spend significant amounts of money on quality control, including customer service interaction. (Hence, mystery shopping being a thing.) I wouldn't be surprised if they find more ways to add AI into the loop, including analyzing photos of produced food, on top of analyzing customer service interactions, just as a cost saving measure.
This is a better idea. Put the headset on a delay so AI can inject the requisite politeness. Construction workers don’t have to turn screws by hand so why shouldn’t service workers have a tool that helps them give great customer service?
As it is when I go to some fast food places they greet you in one voice (possibly a central ordering system) and you get a second voice that interrupts (local people I suspect) and takes over. It's weird.
Those pre-ordering recordings asking if I'm using an app are already horrible enough as it is. Offloading basic human politeness to machines would be even worse.
If someone is being forced by an AI to be polite to you, is it really still basic human politeness? Or is it some weird, different, corporate-hellscape-mediated thing
Less offensive than a completely meaningless forced "please" and "thank you" coming from an employee who only does it because if they don't they are punished.
Not sure if you are implying that by adding tipping you will get the employees to be more personable/pleasant. If you are:
I can assure that is not the case. I would love to know what the secret is to getting people to show an ounce of enthusiasm. A family member has a bakery and getting the front of house to engage with the customer at all is like pulling teeth, and this is an above-minimum-wage job with tips. They aren't on "commission" (it's been tried) but their tips are directly influenced by the ticket price (obviously).
The secret is paying them more (sometimes via tips) and firing them easily. This only works if you're very successful, of course. High end restaurants don't have this problem because the number of waiters wanting tips on $500 bills is very high, and the poor performers get the boot immediately.
I tipped a couple times at coffee shops in the past (via tablet). Didn't receive any acknowledgement and felt like an idiot afterwards. I don't tip now.
Very true observation. I've tipped quite a few times at coffee and similar kinds of shops, on the tablet when they flip it around towards you, and I've never received any acknowledgement about it. I'm not sure if they are checking ungratefully or just not checking, but I've stopped tipping in those situations.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever received exceptional service in that situation either. I'm not sure what that would even look like. Beyond some eye contact and a friendly tone, what is the tip supposed to incentivize?
I love that we're inventing jobs for computers to do automatically at great expense with no real value added. The "burning investor money for heat" phase of AI development is really bringing out the weirdo in everyone.
We should be happy "AI" came around after the downfall of their* "Would you like to super-size that?" scheme[1]. Multiple sociopathic fast-food marketing breakthroughs may have been too much for America to survive.
Because which employer we work for is voluntary. If I own a business, I can choose which systems I implement in order to ensure a certain level of quality. If I had a logistics company, would it be inhumane to install cameras in the truck and GPS devices that monitor speed? Absolutely not. There's something called "risk" and from a business standpoint, it needs to be mitigated and controlled.
That is why, as employees, even certain key words are monitored on our computers. If we're in a relationship with a co-worker, it needs to get reported. The list goes on.
A critical part of fast food is customer service. If customer services goes down the drain, that presents a very real business risk to Burger King.
To a certain extent, this has been a standard practice in the field of customer service representatives that are taking calls all day. Their calls are monitored and recorded, then reviewed to ensure a certain level of performance.
Fast food service is one of the most dehumanizing soul crushing jobs a person can do. I'm speaking from first hand experience that you're clearly lacking. On top of the abuse the workers deal with from all sides every single day, to have a robot giving you demerits based on specific language is fucking disgusting.
1. You assumed I don't have fast food experience and did not care to even know. It was more important to try and make a point, even if it was in a dishonest way. That says a lot about you.
2. Fast food is NOT one of the most dehumanizing soul crushing jobs. Yes, you deal with a lot of rude customers. But if you go into fast food unprepared for that, that's on you. It is part of the job (also part of hospitality) and it all comes down to how you respond and handle it.
3. If you're working fast food and willing to accept, or are stuck with, a low-wage job, that means there's other readily-available low-wage jobs that you can switch to. Working fast food is voluntary.
Since you have so much fast food experience, why did you not address how egregious customer service can be at places like Burger King? It's a problem. I've lost count of the amount of times a bunch of young employees slammed drive through windows on me, had an aggressive attitude simply because something wasn't right in their day, etc.
As a customer, I report it, but then feel like nothing gets done. It's my word against theirs. These systems allow management to actually know what's happening, who said what, if someone is disrespecting customers, etc.
Based on what you think is disgusting, I suspect you lack a TON of life experience and exposure to the world. My first-hand experience has led me to believe that a 5-year having to be on the streets selling candy full-time is "effing degusting".
Your definition if disgusting sounds very first-world.
Burger King already was doing this at their drive thru to check if employees were saying keywords like "you rule" and determining the customer's mood. Also saving a recording of the interaction for who knows how long. BobDaHacker got into their system with an auth bypass and exposed it[1]. It's very draconian.
[1] https://archive.is/fMYQp (BK DMCA'd the original article offline[2])
[2] https://bobdahacker.com/blog/rbi-hacked-drive-thrus/
The screenshots of the backend “Assistant” in [1] pretty much seem like this is what Burger King is expanding upon. It seemed already able to determine out-of-stocks and was gathering cleanliness data for the bathrooms.
It also sounds like they’re basically confirming [1] as well out loud — “He adds that the company is currently testing the AI drive-thru technology in fewer than 100 restaurants.”
Of note, I recall back in the mid-2000s there was a swing-down device near the order packing zone in the Burger King kitchen and it had a screen and a keypad on it and was labeled the “Manager’s Assistant” (or maybe “Kitchen Minder”?) device. From what I understood it was tracking production, providing reminders to check the bathroom, and providing projected order volume information.
https://www.goicc.com/kitchen-minder-tech-support
Can they use AI to check if their employees actually assemble the burger before slapping it into the box? I don't know why burger king and mcdonalds have this problem when every other burger shop manages it fine. Basically what I'm saying is if burger king management is concerned about customer experience, or even if they don't give a shit and just want AI on their resume, there are better approaches..
Burger King is not in the "too big to fail" category. Writing letters to people in the company would probably be pretty effective here. Even if you don't eat at Burger King, when AI takes over all software jobs, you might end up making more money by working there someday. Protecting your interests is important.
Is it okay for human managers to make sure the employees are being polite? But not AI? Why?
> Burger King is not in the "too big to fail" category.
How the hell have they survived this long. It’s consistently been the worst fast food burger restaurant I’ve been across the various states I’ve lived.
I know things are bad in tech, but it's still about 50% people stoned out their gourd everytime I go to a chain drive through. These chains are not in a position to meaningfully enforce how the interaction happens, they are barely in a position to meaningfully enforce that the worker is sober enough to form a sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
Yup. It is mildly funny how we were full steam ahead for building one too until, suddenly, investors realized it could wipe out their other investments..and then it kinda stopped. Instead, Gartner is listing universal orchestrator ( or whatever the official name was ) as a path forward.
I always thought we were a step away from Manna when we had voice-based picking in warehouses. Guess we’ve finally taken it all the way to the actual full-on Manna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-directed_warehousing
This is very stupid. No one wants this. People don't like false sincerity. Even when we know that it's someones job to be nice, we appreciate when it feels genuine.
If you want people to genuinely be nice, give them reasons. Make them happy. Help them stay motivated. Otherwise you cheapen "please" and "thank you" even more than is already the case and get zero value out of it because no one will appreciate it knowing that it's forced.
A world where everyone says "please" and "thank you" isn't a better world.
[delayed]
When I used to do a lot of phone tech support and my employer hired a company to do customer satisfaction surveys. I got a 0 out of 5 on several occasions with the comment "Stop calling me at this phone number, I don't know who you people are.". Someone gave the wrong phone number to the survey company and they hadn't called the customer I worked with.
I was told by my managers there was nothing they could do about it because nobody was allowed to edit the total scores or remove obviously bad records because someone might do that for the wrong reasons. So I just had to live with it.
I have it in my head that a lot of these problems core issue is a lack of faith / effort in creating good front line management. At a food place a good front line manager keeps everyone going, the mood light, and can really make all the difference in the world, but rather lazy middle, upper managers, would slap some survey or metrics or AI on things.
In that way it's no really an AI issue, just the typical bad management issue.
>Because it’s integrated with the new cloud point-of-sale system, the AI assistant will also alert managers if a machine is down for maintenance or when an item is out of stock. “Within 15 minutes, the entire ecosystem will remove it from stock
If you're out of fries ... taking 15 minutes to reflect that on the menu doesn't seem very fast.
Sadly, I think this is only the beginning. Once video monitoring becomes cheap and easy we will see "shirts folded per hour", "distance swept per annum", "steps deviating from optimum path between van and front door", "customers approached per shift" etc
Wait, AI has not replaced the employees yet? Where are the multi-lingual multi-skilled androids?
~ I would like a burger, fries oh and come tune my trucks engine and neutralize that mugger that is attacking that elderly woman just down the street.
Why not have the "AI" headset also apply an electric shock to encourage friendliness?
Will the customer who is not smiling also receive a shock?
[delayed]
-15 Social Credit Score for failing to saying please
I used to work for a company that did "Electronic Monitoring", the nice name for monitoring people with ankle bracelets. One thing that never ceased to amaze me is how almost everyone I talked to about it or showed the device (I wore one occasionally for testing purposes) assumed or asked there was a way to shock the person wearing it.
I guess on the face of it that's not a crazy thing to think but I was always struck by how "normal" people seemed to think that would be. Maybe it's TV/Movies that have done something like that and make people think it's a real thing but more importantly (disgustingly?) that it's perfectly reasonable.
Burger King corporate here. We've already been working on that. Rollout is scheduled for Q2.
Don't give them ideas.
Well, you may not like it, but BK probably have done their research and found that employees positive interaction with customers equals more sales.
Yes, there are probably a thousand other actions they could take to increase number of sold meals, but my guess this one is easy pickings, i.e. cost vs return.
Around where I live (Chicago suburbs), BK restaurants are closing often. Even new ones, open for a year or so close down (many buildings are turned into dispensaries for some reason). Their issues are deeper than how employees greet customers.
We're in a meme timeline, the amount of shit the human mind can come up with is amazing, even AGI wouldn't come up with these schemes
Companies like Burger King spend significant amounts of money on quality control, including customer service interaction. (Hence, mystery shopping being a thing.) I wouldn't be surprised if they find more ways to add AI into the loop, including analyzing photos of produced food, on top of analyzing customer service interactions, just as a cost saving measure.
Why not just use AI to say 'please' and 'thank you'?
This is a better idea. Put the headset on a delay so AI can inject the requisite politeness. Construction workers don’t have to turn screws by hand so why shouldn’t service workers have a tool that helps them give great customer service?
I think because you get the disjointed Idiocracy Carl's Junior interaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d7SaO0JAHk
As it is when I go to some fast food places they greet you in one voice (possibly a central ordering system) and you get a second voice that interrupts (local people I suspect) and takes over. It's weird.
As a customer, I'd find that actively offensive.
Those pre-ordering recordings asking if I'm using an app are already horrible enough as it is. Offloading basic human politeness to machines would be even worse.
If someone is being forced by an AI to be polite to you, is it really still basic human politeness? Or is it some weird, different, corporate-hellscape-mediated thing
Why not just have an AI to find that offensive, instead of you.
If the food at BK doesn't offend you, why would this?
Less offensive than a completely meaningless forced "please" and "thank you" coming from an employee who only does it because if they don't they are punished.
I find making employees say please and thank you substantially more offensive.
As opposed to the satisfaction of watching a minimum wage worker being zapped by an AI-powered collar and mumbling "Th-tha nk you" as a result.
Yeah, that'd definitely be The Truly Sincere Experience™.
Because the headset doesn't have a loudspeaker mode.
But V2 will! The "AI" will handle the whole customer interaction, with the human doing nothing but carrying it around on his head.
Slightly less-worse take than "isn't it ultimately better if the employees are more polite?"
I wonder if a similar system is in place at McDonald's because they never fail to ask if I'm using the app, it's pretty annoying
They should also check for hot dog vs not hot dog
Or, check there's no dog in the hot?
The proven method is to allow tipping.
Not sure if you are implying that by adding tipping you will get the employees to be more personable/pleasant. If you are:
I can assure that is not the case. I would love to know what the secret is to getting people to show an ounce of enthusiasm. A family member has a bakery and getting the front of house to engage with the customer at all is like pulling teeth, and this is an above-minimum-wage job with tips. They aren't on "commission" (it's been tried) but their tips are directly influenced by the ticket price (obviously).
The secret is paying them more (sometimes via tips) and firing them easily. This only works if you're very successful, of course. High end restaurants don't have this problem because the number of waiters wanting tips on $500 bills is very high, and the poor performers get the boot immediately.
I tipped a couple times at coffee shops in the past (via tablet). Didn't receive any acknowledgement and felt like an idiot afterwards. I don't tip now.
Very true observation. I've tipped quite a few times at coffee and similar kinds of shops, on the tablet when they flip it around towards you, and I've never received any acknowledgement about it. I'm not sure if they are checking ungratefully or just not checking, but I've stopped tipping in those situations.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever received exceptional service in that situation either. I'm not sure what that would even look like. Beyond some eye contact and a friendly tone, what is the tip supposed to incentivize?
Interestingly enough, that's exactly how Marshal Brain's Manna starts.
Does their CEO, Joshua Kobza say 'please' and 'thank you'? I have doubts.
And it won't make Burger King a better fast food joint at all. Employee compliance with rules is pretty obviously not what's wrong with BK.
Does anyone actually still eat in Burger King?
I would have had more respect for this 'invention' had the AI was being used on customers, with automated, activated consequences ...
Some variation on the extendable punch glove: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr1B9a_2Cy4
I love that we're inventing jobs for computers to do automatically at great expense with no real value added. The "burning investor money for heat" phase of AI development is really bringing out the weirdo in everyone.
"please" and "thank you" are the least of burger king's problems
"You have 20 seconds to say 'thank you', will you comply?"
We should be happy "AI" came around after the downfall of their* "Would you like to super-size that?" scheme[1]. Multiple sociopathic fast-food marketing breakthroughs may have been too much for America to survive.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersize
* I know this was primarily McDonald's innovation, but Burger King was guilty of it, too.
[dead]
How is this draconian? An employer is embedding systems into its processes to monitor customer service.
You don't see how this is a deeply inhuman to not only monitor people but make it a condition of their job to say certain words or be fired?
Nope. And I can tell you why.
Because which employer we work for is voluntary. If I own a business, I can choose which systems I implement in order to ensure a certain level of quality. If I had a logistics company, would it be inhumane to install cameras in the truck and GPS devices that monitor speed? Absolutely not. There's something called "risk" and from a business standpoint, it needs to be mitigated and controlled.
That is why, as employees, even certain key words are monitored on our computers. If we're in a relationship with a co-worker, it needs to get reported. The list goes on.
A critical part of fast food is customer service. If customer services goes down the drain, that presents a very real business risk to Burger King.
To a certain extent, this has been a standard practice in the field of customer service representatives that are taking calls all day. Their calls are monitored and recorded, then reviewed to ensure a certain level of performance.
Fast food service is one of the most dehumanizing soul crushing jobs a person can do. I'm speaking from first hand experience that you're clearly lacking. On top of the abuse the workers deal with from all sides every single day, to have a robot giving you demerits based on specific language is fucking disgusting.
1. You assumed I don't have fast food experience and did not care to even know. It was more important to try and make a point, even if it was in a dishonest way. That says a lot about you.
2. Fast food is NOT one of the most dehumanizing soul crushing jobs. Yes, you deal with a lot of rude customers. But if you go into fast food unprepared for that, that's on you. It is part of the job (also part of hospitality) and it all comes down to how you respond and handle it.
3. If you're working fast food and willing to accept, or are stuck with, a low-wage job, that means there's other readily-available low-wage jobs that you can switch to. Working fast food is voluntary.
Since you have so much fast food experience, why did you not address how egregious customer service can be at places like Burger King? It's a problem. I've lost count of the amount of times a bunch of young employees slammed drive through windows on me, had an aggressive attitude simply because something wasn't right in their day, etc.
As a customer, I report it, but then feel like nothing gets done. It's my word against theirs. These systems allow management to actually know what's happening, who said what, if someone is disrespecting customers, etc.
Based on what you think is disgusting, I suspect you lack a TON of life experience and exposure to the world. My first-hand experience has led me to believe that a 5-year having to be on the streets selling candy full-time is "effing degusting".
Your definition if disgusting sounds very first-world.