Burger King’s New AI Assistant Is Designed to Be Helpful, but Will Workers Beef About It? |
Burger King’s New AI Assistant Is Designed to Be Helpful, but Will Workers Beef About It?
Burger King employees will talk with Patty, an AI voice in their headsets that may keep tabs on words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’
BY BEN SHERRY, STAFF REPORTER @BENLUCASSHERRY
After disrupting nearly every white-collar job, AI is coming for a new career: fast-food restaurant manager.
Burger King is debuting a new AI assistant, and is putting a voice AI directly into its employees’ headsets. The company has announced BK Assistant, which it describes as “a new AI-powered operations platform designed to bring real-time, voice-enabled intelligence to restaurant teams.” The platform will connect data from POS systems, kitchen equipment, inventory, and digital orders.
Employees will mainly interact with the BK Assistant through “Patty,” a voice AI that the company says “lives inside cloud-connected headsets and is powered by an OpenAI base model.” According to The Verge, which spoke to BK chief digital officer Thibault Roux, Patty is primarily a “coaching tool,” designed to monitor how friendly employees are with customers.
Roux told The Verge that Burger King has taught its AI system to recognize phrases like “welcome to Burger King,” “please,” and “thank you.” BK Assistant could keep track of how often employees use these phrases, and managers will be able to score their location’s “friendliness.”
In a statement shared with Inc., a Burger King spokesperson said that BK Assistant “is not designed to track or evaluate employees saying specific words or phrases. BK Assistant is a coaching and operational support tool built to help our restaurant teams manage complexity and stay focused on delivering a great guest experience.”
The spokesperson added that in some of the locations in which BK Assistant is being piloted, “we’ve explored using aggregated keywords — including phrases like ‘welcome,’ ‘please,’ and ‘thank you’ — as one of many signals to help managers understand overall service patterns.”
BK claims that this is “not about scoring individuals or enforcing scripts,” but rather “reinforcing great hospitality and giving managers helpful, real-time insights so they can recognize their teams more effectively.”