Meet ‘Patty,’ Burger King’s new AI assistant that lives in employees’ headsets |
Meet ‘Patty,’ Burger King’s new AI assistant that lives in employees’ headsets
Customers are already calling it ‘dystopian.’
[Photo: Courtesy of Burger King]
At hundreds of Burger King restaurants across the U.S., there’s a new invisible worker who’s tracking which ingredients are in stock, analyzing daily sales data, and checking in on whether employees are saying “Thank you” and “You’re welcome.” It’s an AI assistant named Patty.
According to Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, the voice-activated chatbot is designed to help employees and managers handle tasks that might usually require pulling out a computer or consulting with an instruction guide. Patty began showing up at select locations about a year ago, and is now in a pilot phase at approximately 500 Burger Kings. It’s expected to roll out to the rest of the chain’s U.S. locations by the end of the year.
On a day-to-day basis, Patty has an array of functions, from letting a manager know if a store is low on onions to helping an employee build a new burger. But it has another role that’s raising quite a few eyebrows: analyzing Burger King locations based on “friendliness” by tracking employees’ use of key phrases like “Welcome to Burger King,” “Please,” and “Thank you.”
Online, commenters are concerned that this functionality is a slippery slope toward 1984-style “employee surveillance.” In an interview with Fast Company, though, Roux clarified that Patty is not being used to analyze individual employees’ performance, and is instead imagined as a kind of “coach.”
“It’s truly meant to be a coaching and operational tool to really help our restaurants manage complexities and stay focused on a great guest experience,” Roux says. “Guests want our service to be more friendly, and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to achieve here.”
Patty, are we running low on Diet Coke?
Technically, Patty is the chatbot version of Burger King’s assistant platform, which collects data from operations including drive-through conversations, inventory, and sales, and then uses AI to analyze patterns in that data. For now, Patty operates on a customized model from OpenAI, though Roux says the technology is flexible enough that it could integrate with another partner in the future (like Anthropic or Gemini) depending on the company’s needs.
For managers and employees in stores, Roux says Patty operates similarly to something like Siri. Patty is activated by a small button on the side of an employee’s headset, and they can ask it direct verbal questions related to their specific store—like recent sales figures or inventory updates—as well as more general company information, to which the bot will provide a verbal answer.
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