Wendy's is replacing humans with AI next month

[Fasterthannothing]

Summary

Starting in June Wendy's will roll out AI to their stores and begin the process of being completely automated.

 

Quotes

Quote

Kevin Vasconi, Wendy's chief information officer, said early tests have been promising. "It's at least as good as our best customer service representative, and it's probably on average better," he said.

 

My thoughts

Well I guess it's official boys and girls AI has started replacing people's jobs in mass scale as do as June. The estimates say this system will displace 14 million workers just at Wendy's alone.

 

Sources

 https://www.techspot.com/news/98622-happening-ai-chatbot-replace-human-order-takers-wendy.html

[OhYou_]

6 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Summary

Starting in June Wendy's will roll out AI to their stores and begin the process of being completely automated.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

Well I guess it's official boys and girls AI has started replacing people's jobs in mass scale as do as June. The estimates say this system will displace 14 million workers just at Wendy's alone.

 

Sources

 https://www.techspot.com/news/98622-happening-ai-chatbot-replace-human-order-takers-wendy.html

good. 
less overhead

cheaper food

less money going to food

more money going to education and bettering your life

education and bettering your life going to self worth

self worth going to image

image going to physical shape

physical shape going to eating healthier

eating healthier going to not eating wendys. 

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

7 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

good. 
less overhead

cheaper food

less money going to food

more money going to education and bettering your life

education and bettering your life going to self worth

self worth going to image

image going to physical shape

physical shape going to eating healthier

eating healthier going to not eating wendys. 

 

You think more unemployed people means more money to education?  Do you even understand how a lot of education is funded?

 

Less people in jobs means less money in the economy, less tax being paid, higher prices in general as less people are spending.  Paying less humans in a capitalist economy is always ultimately a bad thing.

[Poinkachu]

4 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Summary

Starting in June Wendy's will roll out AI to their stores and begin the process of being completely automated.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

Well I guess it's official boys and girls AI has started replacing people's jobs in mass scale as do as June. The estimates say this system will displace 14 million workers just at Wendy's alone.

 

Sources

 https://www.techspot.com/news/98622-happening-ai-chatbot-replace-human-order-takers-wendy.html

Possible scenario :

 

Spoiler

A car drove into the drive-thru

Dad : "I'd like to order two fries, two cheeseburger with extra cheese--"

Kid A & B at the backseat : "I want a milkshake!" "I wan 10 sundaes!"

Dad : "No sweethearts you ate ice cream already--"

Kid : "I want ice cream too !"

 

AI : "2 French Fries, 2 Cheeseburger with extra cheese, 1 Milkshake, 10 Sundaes, 1 Ice Cream. Is there anything else you'd like to add ?"

Dad : "No no, Just 1 fries and 1 cheeseburger"--

Kids : "WE WANT ICE CREAM !!"

AI : "1 French Fries, 1 Cheeseburger, and an Ice Cream. Is there anything else you'd like to add ?"

Dad : *Annoyed & Frustated* "NO! , JUST 2 FRIES AND 2 BURGERS !!"

AI : "Which kind of burder you'd like to order ?"

Dad : "CHEESEBURGER"

AI : "2 French Fries and 2 Cheeseburgers, is this correct ?"

Kids chanting : "ICE CREAM & SUNDAE, ICE CREAM & SUNDAE, ICE CREAM & SUNDAE"

AI : "2 French Fries, 2 Cheeseburgers, 1 Ice Cream, and 1 Sundae. Is there anything else you'd like to add ?"

Dad : *Totally frustated* "FINE! THATS ALL"

(Proceeds to totalling the price & giving bill, payment etc)

In the end the Cheeseburgers doesn't come with extra cheese.

 

[OhYou_]

2 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

You think more unemployed people means more money to education?  Do you even understand how a lot of education is funded?

if you pay less on food, you have more income to spend, perhaps spending it on better education. 

the workers of wendys will just move to different jobs. they are not just unemployed for the rest of their life once they lose their McJob at wendys. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Just now, OhYou_ said:

if you pay less on food, you have more income to spend, perhaps spending it on better education. 

the workers of wendys will just move to different jobs. they are not just unemployed for the rest of their life once they lose their McJob at wendys. 

They will if that's the only job they can do and everyone adopts AI instead.

[OhYou_]

Just now, Alex Atkin UK said:

They will if that's the only job they can do and everyone adopts AI instead.

humans can do anything

[Alex Atkin UK]

Just now, OhYou_ said:

humans can do anything

Don't make me laugh.  Humans still believe in a mythical being that created everything, many humans are not very adaptable at all.  Plus there's a lot more humans than jobs.

[OhioYJ]

2 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

if you pay less on food, you have more income to spend, perhaps spending it on better education. 

You're under the assumption, that a big corporation is passing the savings on to the consumer. Usually savings for a company just means more profits for the company and their shareholders, not cheaper stuff. 

 

I wouldn't bet on cheaper spicy chicken sandwiches anytime soon....

[Poinkachu]

9 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

humans can do anything

Putting other stuffs you said which is at best assumptions based on a very idealistic world & surface level thinking aside..

Somehow you :

Assumed they will reduce the price.

 

Some restaurants reduce their employee amount and make user self-order using app. The price either same or increase.

In fact, I pay more since I use data to order, no matter how miniscule amount it is.

[TVwazhere]

10 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

if you pay less on food, you have more income to spend, perhaps spending it on better education. 

>saving $3 on a meal means you have more money to give to tuition, which has increased anywhere from 180% to Over 300%

 

$3 a day for a year is just under $1100. There's no way people just aren't able to afford their schooling because they're only $1100 short. And as others have pointed out, that's IF they pass on the savings. 

[Holmes108]

12 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

 

I wouldn't bet on cheaper spicy chicken sandwiches anytime soon....

 

But at least they won't forget my bacon.

[OhYou_]

3 minutes ago, TVwazhere said:

>saving $3 on a meal means you have more money to give to tuition, which has increased anywhere from 180% to Over 300%

 

$3 a day for a year is just under $1100. There's no way people just aren't able to afford their schooling because they're only $1100 short. And as others have pointed out, that's IF they pass on the savings. 

are you implying AI wont drastically change education?
I also wasnt referring directly to going and getting a student debt and a college.

more buy tools learn a skill with them, make yourself 

 

clearly I see i need to be as general as possible otherwise everyone wants to knit pick. 

 

12 minutes ago, Poinkachu said:

Assumed they will reduce the price.

price is a relative term

15 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

I wouldn't bet on cheaper spicy chicken sandwiches anytime soon....

cheaper is a relative term

[TVwazhere]

15 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

are you implying AI wont drastically change education?

No one has suggested otherwise.

16 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

I also wasnt referring directly to going and getting a student debt and a college.

more buy tools learn a skill with them, make yourself 

That's a very abstract definition of "education". Usually people use the term "Hobby", or "side hustle" at best when you're trying to turn something that you buy tools for, into a career with no formal method of education via an accredited institution. 

18 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

clearly I see i need to be as general as possible otherwise everyone wants to knit pick. 

Calling you out for trying to say education = more money to buy paint brushes for art, or a saw & drill for carpentry is not a common sense use of the term. Nitpicking would be defined as me pointing out that nitpicking is not spelled with a k, or: 

21 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

price is a relative term

cheaper is a relative term

Price, is not in fact, a relative term. 

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, OhYou_ said:

cheaper food

You new to large corporations? 99% chance that savings is not passed to the consumer and merely goes into shareholder's pockets and the C-suites yearly bonuses. 

[OhYou_]

2 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

You new to large corporations? 99% chance that savings is not passed to the consumer and merely goes into shareholder's pockets and the C-suites yearly bonuses. 

trickle down economics. 

Look I dont all ways explain things before jumping to conclusions so here you go. 

they are not just a large corporation, they are a food industry. 

food industry is relative to population. 

population is going to take too much typing to explain, number go up, random area of the world get more people near by

it is imperative that they grow proportionally and scale to meet but not exceed this number. 

why not exceed? more workers, more property, more overhead for no gain.

 

the removal of workforce means smaller restaurants, less land cost, less cost to build, less overhead for workforce, probably a few more critical things
the downside? more trained maintenance, more untrained maintenance, way more equipment to maintain. 

 

I assure you there are teams of smart people who have calculated all of this and seen a worthwhile investment in switching to unmanned restaurants. 

I'm willing to wager one of the main benefits is that part I said earlier about exceeding demand. 

it is my opinion that it will result in an increase in growth rate of the company, which literally means more buildings, more equipment, hell more nails and pieces of wood, more jobs to make all those. it is all relative. 

So no, you may not see your burger is a dollar cheaper NOW, but you may not have to drive to get it pretty soon. The price may not scale the same as it has done with inflation. 

[Bananasplit_00]

3 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

trickle down economics. 

Right here all possibilities of discussion ended lmao

[Senzelian]

Google was just talking at I/O about the partnership between Google and Wendy's.

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, OhYou_ said:

trickle down economics. 

Doesn't work.

2 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

they are not just a large corporation, they are a food industry. 

Yes. They are a large corporation in the food industry. Like how Ford is a large corporation in the car industry, alongside competitors like... anyone else who builds cars. Industry = all the companies making that sort of thing, no one company is its own industry, that would be such a clear monopoly that they'd get rekt by the government (some corps try to get close but they still have to toe the line). 

4 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

the removal of workforce means smaller restaurants, less land cost, less cost to build, less overhead for workforce, probably a few more critical things

Yes, which means thicker profit margin. Large corps are not in the habit of handing cost savings down to consumers. I have seen small companies - more directly controlled by people who actually care - do so. Large corps are basically machines just run by people so unless legislation forces their hand, they tend to pocket any savings they can. 

6 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

So no, you may not see your burger is a dollar cheaper NOW, but you may not have to drive to get it pretty soon. The price may not scale the same as it has done with inflation. 

There's a Wendy's 3 minutes from my apartment already. Building more won't stop me from having to drive there to get it. 

[jaslion]

29 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

trickle down economics. 

Don't work they just make the reservoir bigger to not trickle.

[Warcorer]

The article only mentions it being rolled out at one location to one Wendys. Curious to see if this ends up working for them and the actually do a larger rollout or if it just sticks to this one location and fails for a while until they figure it out.

[manikyath]

just this week mcdo's fully flesh and bone humans screwed up my order.. i dont expect AI to do any better.

 

prediction: this is gonna bomb SO HARD that wendy's will just quietly replace this with either a human (again), or a touchscreen order display.. y'know.. the way public transit has been doing things for like a decade now?

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, OhYou_ said:

trickle down economics. 

 

Doesn't work, has never worked, and is the warcry of people trying to deregulate things.

 

The money never trickles down, it just goes into the people at the top's pockets as bonuses they award themselves.

 

As for the topic... somehow I doubt this will go over well. We've had the ability to automate the entire fast food process for a good 20 years and it just never happened, to which I theorize it simply couldn't work because of food safety reasons.

 

Is there room for AI here? Yes, in the drive thru. Where many times you have one person handling the drive thru and customers in the store at the same time. There is no reason you even need someone to do that. The order kiosks at McDonalds already proves that's possible for in-store orders. 

 

That said, I doubt this will result in very many jobs lost.

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wendys-testing-ai-chatbot-drive-thru-orders/

Quote

Fast food chain Wendy's is partnering with Google Cloud on an AI chatbot to take orders at a drive-thru, the company announced Tuesday. Wendy's FreshAI will be launched in June as a pilot in a Columbus, Ohio area restaurant. Based on how the AI-ordering system performs, the pilot will be expanded.

 

The AI could potentially handle a huge portion of service; around 75 to 80% of customers prefer to order through the drive-thru, according to the chain. Wendy's is not the first fast-food chain to turn to automated processes. McDonald's launched an automated restaurant in 2022.

 

Just to make things clear, you can already do plenty with the "app" many restaurants have adopted. The problem is that the app's generally omit drive thru and only do in-store pickup. So they could simply have the customer activate the app on their phone by QR code when they arrive at the drive thru, which tells the app to automatically select the location and "Drive thru order".

 

[Arika]

3 hours ago, OhYou_ said:

it is my opinion that it will result in an increase in growth rate of the company, which literally means more buildings, more equipment, hell more nails and pieces of wood, more jobs to make all those. it is all relative. 

So no, you may not see your burger is a dollar cheaper NOW, but you may not have to drive to get it pretty soon. The price may not scale the same as it has done with inflation. 

And it will also generate more jobs for goalpost movers....

[StDragon]

4 hours ago, OhYou_ said:

humans can do anything

...that can't or won't be done by AI.

 

That's what's so disruptive about this technology, in the span of a few years it will completely change the workforce upending decades or more of careers. The young can adapt by moving towards a grey or blue collar jobs. For many others, they can't change and will either retire early or struggle to adapt to a new workforce reality that's picking up momentum with evermore changes. There's no stability in that, and a society can't function without a baseline of a work/life balance.

AI is awesome technology, but it's exceedingly disruptive at the same time. With the "good", you're going to accept the "bad" and "ugly" with it.