Burger King Will Stick AI In Employees’ Headsets To Make Sure They Say ‘Please’ And ‘Thank You’

As big business desperately tries to justify the impossible waste of money, resources, time and jobs that have been lost to the scam that is “AI,” we are going to see increasingly ridiculous uses of the completely useless LLMs with which the planet has been lumbered. Today’s entry in that painfully long list is Burger King’s latest venture, via which, as The Verge reports, the poor underpaid staff of its restaurants are going to have a chatbot placed in their headsets, a GenAI that’s going to spy on them and judge their performance.

I don’t know if you can still remember how we imagined AI in the optimistic fiction of the ’60s and ’70s, but its primary role was to make our lives so much easier that we could work less and enjoy more. Yet the only tangible result of this current nonsensical bastardization of the concept is to either take people’s incomes away entirely, or make their lives so much harder. That’s going to be the case for Burger King staff until the company eventually realizes what a clusterfuck this will inevitably cause, and remove “Patty” from its staff’s heads.

Patty is the oh-so clever name for a voice-enabled chatbot that will, The Verge says, “assist employees with meal preparations” but also “evaluate their interactions with customers for ‘friendliness.'”

This dystopian concept is proudly boasted of by BK’s chief digital officer, Thibault Roux (the most baddie name of all time), who told The Verge that the GenAI has been trained on information compiled by the company “from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness,” such that the bot recognizes polite phrases and can act as a “coaching tool.” Patty will also be there for the staff to ask questions of, in case they’ve forgotten the ingredients for a new burger or suchlike, and then we presume feed all this back to its masters. This tool will apparently also keep stock information up-to-date across a site and its menu, despite that being something a basic computer program with no room for hallucination could far more easily manage.

Of course, it won’t be used in the drive-thrus to take orders, because fast food joints already found out how disastrously that all worked out. But this’ll be fine!

It’s all so sinister and all so stupid, and given it’ll be an LLM, it’ll confidently make up anything it doesn’t have data for. This will all likely lead to wildly inaccurate stock information, misinformation being given to customers, and nonsense instructions being fed to staff, and it’s presumably those minimum wage employees who will bear the burden of this all. Burger King says this will be rolled out to all of its stores by the end of 2026, and is being piloted in 500 stores already. I imagine we’ll hear that it’s being withdrawn around June.