Fast Food Giant Is Using AI to Make Sure Human Employees Say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’

Burger King’s new AI system tracks if employees are polite to customers, marking a new phase of AI-powered workplace surveillance in fast food. 

This week, the fast food giant introduced a new AI voice assistant called “Patty,” which listens to every drive-thru conversation and rates employees depending on their level of friendliness.

Patty lives in the same headset employees use to take orders at the drive-thru. While workers talk to customers, Patty transcribes and analyzes the conversation in real time, paying close attention to specific phrases the company has defined as markers of friendliness, such as “please,” “thank you” and “welcome to Burger King.”

It then generates a politeness score for each interaction, which managers can see. Managers can compare politeness metrics against other data they already track, such as speed of service and order accuracy. 

Patty can also tell employees how to make items on the menu, reciting recipes for workers. 

A Burger King spokesperson told Entrepreneur that Patty is powered by an OpenAI base model layered with the brand’s proprietary in-house architecture. The voice assistant is part of a broader AI-powered operations platform called BK Assistant, which can perform actions like automatically alerting managers to remove items from digital menus when a product becomes unavailable. 

The BK Assistant web and app platform will be available to all U.S. restaurants by the end of 2026, the spokesperson stated. The voice-enabled headset experience with Patty is currently being piloted in 500 restaurants, they added. Burger King has approximately 6,600 restaurants in the U.S. 

Why Burger King says it is doing this

Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, told The Verge that Burger King designed the AI system after working with franchisees and customers to define friendliness in measurable terms. From that feedback, the company identified the phrases most associated with good service and trained the AI to reliably pick them out.

This is a new application of AI in the workplace, according to The Tech Buzz. Companies have deployed AI chatbots in customer service and in warehouses, but embedding AI into employee headsets to analyze behavior in real-time is new territory. In an industry where margins are tight and poor online reviews can quickly hurt a location, Burger King is betting that quantifying politeness will translate into better customer satisfaction and, eventually, better sales.

What it means for workers

For employees, Patty changes the nature of being “on” at work because the politeness standard is no longer just a manager’s expectation but an automated score applied to every interaction, per The Tech Buzz. The AI doesn’t just notice whether an order is correct; it notices whether the worker remembered to say the magic words, and that can follow the employee in performance reviews or coaching conversations.

Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and KFC have all experimented with using AI assistants, but for another purpose — to automate taking orders at drive-thrus. McDonald’s ended its drive-thru AI test in June 2024 after finding that the system frequently misinterpreted orders.

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