Burger King has introduced an AI chatbot into its daily fast food restaurant operations. “Patty,” the AI voice powered by an OpenAI base model, will live inside employees’ headsets to collect data on “friendliness” and simplify workflow.
The bot is part of a new web and app platform, BK Assistant, that is designed to provide training and operational support. It’s expected to do everything from alerting managers about items that are no longer available to helping workers remember the ingredients in limited-time offers. It will also analyze the conversations between employees and customers at the drive-thru window.
Burger King told NBC News on Thursday that BK Assistant won’t listen to all of employees’ conversations and that the goal isn’t about “scoring” people or encouraging workers to stick to scripts. The assistant will, however, begin listening from the moment customers pull up to place their orders until the point when their cars drive away.
The system will gather data points from employees’ interactions with customers, using, for example, keywords like “welcome,” “please” and “thank you,” which the company said it explored as a signal to help managers understand service patterns.
“One of the ways that we started this was, you know, picking certain keywords … but it’s one mechanism that was used to iterate on how to define friendliness,” Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, said in an interview.
“It’s really a coaching tool, right? To help you as an employee become more hospitable, and we’re going to help you also with certain operation flaws that may occur that can be a little bit complex,” he added.
The voice-enabled headset is being piloted in 500 restaurants. Both the web and app versions of BK Assistant are expected to be available to Burger King restaurants in the U.S. by the end of the year.
