Top AI Product

So Burger King just dropped something that’s equal parts fascinating and unsettling. It’s called [Patty](https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/burger-king-tests-openai-powered-headsets-that-will-track-the-friendliness-of-drive-through-workers/), an OpenAI-powered voice assistant that lives inside employee headsets — and yes, it’s tracking whether workers say “please” and “thank you.”

Restaurant Brands International, BK’s parent company, announced the pilot is already running in about 500 U.S. locations. Patty is the spoken interface of a broader system called BK Assistant, which combines a web dashboard, a mobile app, and these AI-enabled headsets into one operational hub. The idea is pretty straightforward: give crew members a voice they can ask questions to during a shift. Need to know how many bacon strips go on a Whopper? Ask Patty. Shake machine acting up? Patty walks you through cleaning it. Ran out of a menu item? Tell Patty and it disappears from the digital menu boards automatically.

The operational stuff honestly makes a lot of sense. [NBC News reports](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/burger-king-ai-chatbot-please-thank-you-rcna260848) that Patty can also ping managers when inventory is low — like flagging a Diet Coke shortage before customers start complaining. One fun detail: the system apparently noticed how often staff were telling customers “Sorry, we don’t have that” about apple pie, which contributed to BK bringing it back. That’s a genuinely clever use of aggregate data.

But then there’s the friendliness tracking, and that’s where things get spicy. Patty uses speech recognition to detect keywords like “welcome,” “please,” and “thank you,” then rolls those up into store-level benchmarks. Burger King’s chief digital officer Thibault Roux [told Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/91499293/meet-patty-burger-kings-new-ai-assistant-that-lives-in-employees-headsets) it’s meant as a coaching tool, not an individual scorecard. The company insists it’s not scoring people or enforcing scripts.

The internet, predictably, is not buying it. [Reddit has been brutal](https://www.notebookcheck.net/AI-aims-to-make-Burger-King-staff-more-friendly-Reddit-responds-with-heavy-criticism.1236601.0.html), with users calling it dystopian surveillance dressed up as “hospitality coaching.” [Kotaku called it spying](https://kotaku.com/burger-king-ai-patty-fast-food-llm-dystopia-2000673998). And the story blew up everywhere — [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/burger-king-tests-openai-powered-headsets-that-will-track-the-friendliness-of-drive-through-workers/), [ABC News](https://abc7ny.com/post/burger-king-is-testing-ai-headsets-will-know-employees-say-welcome-thank/18657423/), [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com), [Complex](https://www.complex.com/life/a/alex-ocho/burger-king-ai-headset-employees), and [Interesting Engineering](https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/burger-king-new-patty-ai) all ran stories within hours of each other on February 27th. Twitter/X threads are still going.

Here’s my honest take: the operational side of Patty is a genuinely useful tool for fast food workers who deal with insane turnover and minimal training time. Having a voice assistant that knows the menu, tracks inventory, and handles the digital boards? That’s practical. But stapling a politeness monitor onto it and calling it “coaching” feels like a misstep — especially when your average drive-through worker is already juggling a headset, a timer, and a line of impatient cars. The last thing they need is an AI keeping score on their manners.

BK plans to roll out BK Assistant to all U.S. locations by the end of 2026. Whether the friendliness tracking survives the backlash remains to be seen.