Burger King is Rolling Out AI in Employees’ Headsets to Track Their Friendliness

Burger King is testing out a new AI called Patty in 500 restaurants that will listen for keywords like “welcome,” “please” and “thank you” and in employees’ headsets and report to managers.

Burger King’s Chief Digital Officer, Thibault Roux, told the Verge that Patty is meant as a way to improve customer service, not to track individual employees. They say they want to capture the tone of conversations as well, not just specific words and phrases.

Patty can also alert employees if a machine is out of order or when an item is out of stock.

You can also ask it questions such as how to make certain food items.

The system is powered by ChatGPT, which means employees’ microphone inputs are constantly being sent off to ChatGPT’s servers in plaintext to be processed.

ChatGPT is cloud-only and lacks privacy protections that some AI services have like TEEs or homomorphic encryption to make data inaccessible while it’s being processed.

The system is part of a new cloud-based point-of-sale system that’s meant to connect all the parts of the business together and help it run smoothly. For example, when a machine is out of order, the digital menu board both in the restaurant and in the drive-through will be updated within 15 minutes.

Patty is just the user-facing voice behind the broader BK Assistant platform that it plans to launch on the web and app platforms in all of their restaurants by the end of 2026.

Burger King says they’re also experimenting with using AI to take orders at the drive-through, but they’re only piloting it at 100 restaurants for now. “Not every guest is ready for this” says Roux.

Other companies like McDonald’s have attempted this in partnership with IBM, but they gave up on it in 2024. Wendy’s and Taco Bell tried similar AI drive-through systems, with mixed results.

The move is part of an overall trend of normalizing workplace surveillance where employees are supposed to expect to be constantly monitored while they’re on the job. Employees are constantly being subjected to more and more surveillance tech, their every word and movement constantly tracked and microanalyzed with the ever-looming threat of punishment or firing on the horizon.

Corporations like Burger King sell this tech as a way to improve efficiency, but the cost to employee well-being isn’t considered. They may give it a cutesy name like “Patty” but it’s still surveillance nonetheless.