The sci-fi dystopia is here. It is now. It’s not some distant, far-off future with flying cars and megacities. It’s the boring now. You need no more evidence than the fact that Burger King is rolling out an AI-powered management system that will live inside employees’ headsets and monitor their performance in real time.
The robot overlords are not hypothetical. They are here, and their name is Patty.
I so wish I had made a terrible pun, but reader, I did not. Patty (as in burger patty) is the name of the AI chatbot voice that is going to be nagging in Burger King employees’ ears.
More broadly, according to NBC News, the system is called BK Assistant and is powered by an OpenAI base model. Patty is the chatbot’s name. As reported by NBC, company executives say the tool is designed to streamline operations by tracking low inventory, flagging dirty bathrooms, updating menus when items run out, and helping workers remember ingredients for limited-time menu items. It’s already active in roughly 500 locations, with plans to expand across all 7,000 U.S. restaurants by the end of 2026.
But Patty doesn’t just track soda syrup levels. Of course not. Why would it, when it can also be an annoying piece of crap? It also listens to drive-thru conversations from the moment a car pulls up until it leaves, scanning for keywords like “welcome,” “please,” and “thank you.” Managers can then request a “friendliness score” for a specific shift or location.
Burger King has invented AI snitches. And you know what happens to snitches, right?
Burger King’s Patty AI Is Just a ‘Coaching Tool’
Thibault Roux, the company’s chief digital officer, has described the system as a “coaching tool” meant to improve hospitality and simplify workflow. Executives insist it’s not about punishing workers, though that feels like exactly how it’s going to be interpreted and probably already is being interpreted by Burger King’s workforce. How else are you supposed to interpret it? Are you supposed to be thankful that now you’re going to have a literal corporate drone chirping in your ear whenever you don’t say thank you to some drive-thru asshole who threw a fit because they ran out of Hershey’s Sunday pies?
BK Assistant pulls data from several points throughout the individual location and the overall Burger King infrastructure, including its point-of-sale systems, kitchen equipment, employee schedules, and customer interactions, in essence creating the perfect robotic digital manager who doesn’t take breaks, doesn’t have mental lapses, and presumably will always be relentlessly perky in a way that makes you want to kill it when it quantifies your tone and politeness in real time and then critiques you.
All the major fast food chains across the country have been experimenting with AI in recent years, most of which ended in mixed or embarrassing results. Remember McDonald’s disastrous experiments with AI that the company had to embarrassingly abandon after they became a national laughingstock? This Burger King one sounds like a less customer-facing version of that.
Fast-food chains including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, White Castle, and Taco Bell have experimented with AI in recent years, often with mixed or embarrassing results. Drive-thru bots have misheard orders, been trolled by customers, and quietly scaled back.
Infusing a highly intrusive AI like this into a fast food kitchen workflow sounds like it’s just going to make work worse, mostly, if not entirely, because you are telling your employees and their managers that you don’t trust them, and that you are actively suspicious of them.
If history is any guide, this kind of experiment rarely ends with better service. It ends with your tail between your legs, as you admit that you did a stupid thing that everyone told you was stupid, but you didn’t want to listen.
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