Burger King is putting AI in employee headsets to monitor how polite workers are to customers. The fast food giant's new voice assistant, dubbed "Patty," doesn't just help with meal prep - it actively listens to every drive-thru interaction and scores employees on friendliness metrics like whether they say "please," "thank you," and "welcome to Burger King." The move signals a new frontier in workplace surveillance, where AI doesn't just automate tasks but actively evaluates human behavior in real-time.
Burger King just turned every drive-thru headset into a listening device. The fast food chain is rolling out an AI assistant called "Patty" that lives inside employee headsets, and it's not just there to help - it's actively grading workers on how nice they sound to customers.
The voice-enabled chatbot is part of what Burger King calls the BK Assistant platform, and it's designed to do two things simultaneously: help employees prepare orders and evaluate whether they're being friendly enough. Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, told The Verge that the company worked with franchisees and customers to define what "friendliness" actually means in measurable terms.
The result? An AI system trained to recognize specific words and phrases. "Welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you" are apparently the magic words that trigger positive scores. Managers can then review these friendliness metrics alongside whatever other performance data they're already tracking. It's workplace surveillance dressed up as customer service optimization.
This isn't just about automation anymore - it's about AI evaluating the emotional labor that service workers perform dozens or hundreds of times per shift. The technology represents a significant shift in how AI gets deployed in retail and quick-service environments. Where previous generations of restaurant tech focused on order accuracy or kitchen efficiency, Patty is explicitly designed to monitor the tone and content of human interactions.
