Burger King will use AI to check if employees say 'please' and 'thank you' (theverge.com)

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Why not just use AI to say 'please' and 'thank you'?

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.

Why not have the "AI" headset also apply an electric shock to encourage friendliness?

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.

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/

"please" and "thank you" are the least of burger king's problems

Does their CEO, Joshua Kobza say 'please' and 'thank you'? I have doubts.

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.

The proven method is to allow tipping.

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.

They should also check for hot dog vs not hot dog

How is this draconian? An employer is embedding systems into its processes to monitor customer service.

Interestingly enough, that's exactly how Marshal Brain's Manna starts.

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..

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

"You have 20 seconds to say 'thank you', will you comply?"

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.

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.