Speaker 1: Hi, can I get to create your own bowl? Please?
Speaker 1: It's lunchtime on a Tuesday in Washington, DC, and our
Speaker 1: producer Moe Barrow walks over to Sweet Green. That's a
Speaker 1: growing chain where the employees make salads and bowls to
Speaker 1: order right in front of you.
Speaker 2: Do you want everything on internet?
Speaker 3: Um?
Speaker 2: Let me see.
Speaker 1: Can we go down the line?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: That part of the appeal, of course, is that you
Speaker 1: can choose exactly what you want.
Speaker 2: I think I'll do spring mix, thanks, red onions, cucumbers
Speaker 2: and cilantro is fine.
Speaker 1: But during the lunch rush it may also mean a
Speaker 1: bit of a weight. Salad makers can only move so fast,
Speaker 1: especially if there's a contemplative person up ahead in line.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you, mo, what else? Oh?
Speaker 2: I can get more?
Speaker 1: But when the sails. That's one reason Sweet Green and
Speaker 1: other fast food places are considering automation to perform some
Speaker 1: jobs like taking orders and making food that are now
Speaker 1: done by people. Sweet Green's potential answer is called the
Speaker 1: Infinite Kitchen. It's a prototype salad and bowl making machine.
Speaker 3: Sweet Green says that one huge advantage is that the
Speaker 3: Infinite Kitchen allows them to get orders done for small
Speaker 3: faster and second of all more accurately in.
Speaker 1: An industry that often struggles to find enough people to
Speaker 1: work those jobs, especially now in a tight labor market
Speaker 1: where workers have more choices. The rise of artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: and other automation has big names like McDonald's and Wendy's.
Speaker 1: Giving it a closer look.
Speaker 2: That will be sixteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: I'm Westksova today on the Big Take. This robot is
Speaker 1: happy to take your order. Bloomberg Business We contributor Elizabeth
Speaker 1: dun and Sauce Wheet Greens Infinite Kitchen Machine in action.
Speaker 3: The Infinite Kitchen is a robotic contraption that Sweet Green
Speaker 3: has just installed in their first new store. Sweet Green
Speaker 3: is kind of famous for these elevated salads that are
Speaker 3: mixed as many as fifty different ingredients in the restaurant.
Speaker 2: They're kind of pricey.
Speaker 3: They range from tennish to fifteen ish dollars, and they've
Speaker 3: got about two hundred stores and they're growing. They've always
Speaker 3: really focused on the idea that their salads are prepped
Speaker 3: right in the store. You see people chopping ingredients, loading
Speaker 3: them into the makelines where somebody's standing in front of
Speaker 3: you and kind of scooping ingredients into the bowl and
Speaker 3: you get the salad at the end. A lot of
Speaker 3: their marketing has focused on this connection with farmers and
Speaker 3: really the idea of freshness and health and quality. I
Speaker 3: actually went and visited the first Sweet Green that is
Speaker 3: equipped with this new technology, which is right outside of Chicago.
Speaker 3: So normally, when you walk into a Sweet Green, you
Speaker 3: walk up to a counter, there are people behind the
Speaker 3: counter assembling these salad bowls. In this location, you walk
Speaker 3: up to the counter, what you see is this huge,
Speaker 3: room height contraption that is filled with tubes of salad ingredients.
Speaker 3: It reminded me kind of like the bulk bins at
Speaker 3: a Whole Foods.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So you've got these like clear tubes of ingredients, and
Speaker 3: when you place your order, a little bowl kind of
Speaker 3: whizzes out underneath and pauses underneath all of the different
Speaker 3: tubes that need to be used.
Speaker 2: To assemble your salad.
Speaker 3: So like the arugola, the quinoa, the beats and gets
Speaker 3: to the end and a Sweet Green employee picks it up,
Speaker 3: gives it a look, maybe adds a couple of delicate ingredients,
Speaker 3: and then hands it over to you.
Speaker 1: And this is the first one. This is like the
Speaker 1: prototype store that they hope will lead to replication and
Speaker 1: across other stores.
Speaker 3: This is the prototype store. It's a technology that they
Speaker 3: acquired a couple of years ago through a company called Spice,
Speaker 3: which had two stores in Boston. So when you think
Speaker 3: about all of the labor that goes into a Sweet
Speaker 3: Green store, and Sweet Greens do typically have as many
Speaker 3: as twenty people per shift to do all of that
Speaker 3: ingredient prep and all of the salad assembly, so it's
Speaker 3: a hugely labor intensive process. When we see automation in
Speaker 3: fast food restaurants or fast casual restaurants, I mean, first
Speaker 3: of all, it's very rare that there really is any
Speaker 3: But when there is, it's usually a device that does
Speaker 3: one very specific thing, like it'll fry tortilla chips, or
Speaker 3: it will help dispense drinks. So these are very specific tasks.
Speaker 3: The interesting thing to me about the Infinite Kitchen is
Speaker 3: that it is able to replace the effort of as
Speaker 3: many as half of the people on a Sweet Green shift.
Speaker 3: You know, you look at this device and there's nothing
Speaker 3: about it that is totally space age. I mean, it
Speaker 3: seems like something that you could imagine in a manufacturing context.
Speaker 3: There's no component of it that is just like wild
Speaker 3: and space Age, but as an addition to their store,
Speaker 3: you could see it being something that really changes the
Speaker 3: dynamics of how those stores work and how many people
Speaker 3: are needed to run them.
Speaker 1: So you said, there's all these tubes and it's filled
Speaker 1: with all the different ingredients. How do the ingredients get
Speaker 1: in the tubes?
Speaker 3: The ingredients get in the tubes by being carried up
Speaker 3: a set of stairs. Employees walk behind the Infinite Kitchen.
Speaker 3: They walk up a series of stairs and you end
Speaker 3: up on this platform behind the Infinite Kitchen. I think
Speaker 3: of it as like the bridge of a ship. It
Speaker 3: looks like a control center. There's screens that have information
Speaker 3: about how full each tube is, and that's fed by
Speaker 3: sensors that are in the tubes. And there's these big
Speaker 3: what look like sort of the lids of chest freezers
Speaker 3: that you open up, and then there is a kind
Speaker 3: of like a just a shoot that you can put
Speaker 3: ingredients down. So you open up the lid of one
Speaker 3: of these kind of chest freezery things and there's tubes
Speaker 3: for chickpeas and cucumber. It's very user friendly. You kind
Speaker 3: of open it up and it's clear where everything goes.
Speaker 3: When the tube is full, the little screen will tell
Speaker 3: you that you've added enough. A big part of what
Speaker 3: the Spice engineers were working on in the past year
Speaker 3: and a half after this sale to Sweet Green was
Speaker 3: just this kind of thing making it super user friendly
Speaker 3: for Sweet Green's hourly workforce.
Speaker 1: So you hit upon this pretty important point, which is
Speaker 1: that if it works, it'll let these restaurants potentially operate
Speaker 1: with fewer employees. And that's a big deal right now,
Speaker 1: because with a tight labor market, fast food restaurants other
Speaker 1: retail businesses are having trouble finding workers who are willing
Speaker 1: to work for relatively low pay, not great benefits, kind
Speaker 1: of long hours, and not very attractive conditions.
Speaker 3: This has really kind of always been a problem for
Speaker 3: food service. It's always been an industry that has really
Speaker 3: high turnover where it's difficult to attract and retain people.
Speaker 3: That's obviously only gotten worse in the current labor situation.
Speaker 3: The current labor market. The industry experts that I spoke
Speaker 3: to about this said, robotic solutions like this, automation like this,
Speaker 3: it's often less about trying to actively fire people and
Speaker 3: it's more about or reducing your need to rehire people,
Speaker 3: to continue to rehire and retrain people. So you're really
Speaker 3: trying to find something that will work with a smaller
Speaker 3: workforce because that's what you're realistically kind of able to maintain.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, though it does result in a store that just
Speaker 1: has fewer people having to work there because the robot
Speaker 1: winds up doing the job of several people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that is definitely the intention. This is
Speaker 3: their first pilot of Infinite Kitchen. They're going to do
Speaker 3: another one in Boston where they take an existing Sweet
Speaker 3: Green and they swap out the make lines and they
Speaker 3: put in an infinite kitchen to test it in that context.
Speaker 3: But the company has been very cautious about what they're
Speaker 3: willing to promise in terms of labor reduction. But it
Speaker 3: is definitely their intention to operate the store with fewer people.
Speaker 1: Of the ideas here is to cut down on operating
Speaker 1: costs of a business. What is the machine like this
Speaker 1: cost itself, and how many people do you need to
Speaker 1: maintain it and all the other things associated with switching
Speaker 1: from a human to a robot.
Speaker 3: So we know that they paid around fifty million dollars
Speaker 3: for the technology in twenty twenty one. We know that
Speaker 3: they've invested something in it between then and now. They've
Speaker 3: got a staff of about twenty engineers that came over
Speaker 3: from Spice with the technology, who have been kind of
Speaker 3: tinkering with it and figuring out how to make it
Speaker 3: work perfectly for the Sweet Green environment. What they did
Speaker 3: tell me in terms of the cost per machine, so
Speaker 3: what does it actually cost to get one of these
Speaker 3: things up and running in a store, They described it
Speaker 3: as a touch more than what it costs to build
Speaker 3: their conventional salad make lines in the restaurants, those lines
Speaker 3: that you see filled with ingredients behind the counter. They're
Speaker 3: custom built. They have a lot of complex refrigeration and
Speaker 3: heating elements in them, so they're more expensive than you
Speaker 3: would think. There's all often two or three of those
Speaker 3: in a store. There's usually one or two behind the
Speaker 3: scenes making orders for digital pickup.
Speaker 2: So when you put.
Speaker 3: Together the whole cost of all of that equipment, I
Speaker 3: suppose you know, the infinite kitchen is not drastically more expensive.
Speaker 1: So have they at the same time automated the ordering
Speaker 1: system so you don't go up to the counter and
Speaker 1: order from a person.
Speaker 3: The majority of Sweet Greens orders already come in via
Speaker 3: app online, there are still a big chunk of people
Speaker 3: who will walk up to the counter and order from
Speaker 3: the person making the salad.
Speaker 2: So in this new.
Speaker 3: Pilot store, instead of a person, there is a tablet,
Speaker 3: so they have a series of touchscreen tablets. It looks
Speaker 3: very similar to what you'd find on the Sweet Green
Speaker 3: app that you use on your phone. They do also
Speaker 3: have one person kind of behind the counter. If you
Speaker 3: are allergic to the idea of entering the information into
Speaker 3: the touch Green yourself, you can tell somebody verbally and
Speaker 3: they will do the same thing for you.
Speaker 1: Am I wrong to think that this all sounds kind
Speaker 1: of needlessly complex? Then you could just have a person
Speaker 1: making a salad.
Speaker 3: So when I've watched prototypes or pilots of kitchen robotics before,
Speaker 3: they often don't seem like they're working very fast, Like
Speaker 3: there'll be a robotic arm that's doing something and you're
Speaker 3: just kind of thinking it feels like it would be
Speaker 3: faster if a human arm was doing this.
Speaker 2: In this case, the thing moves super fast.
Speaker 3: So you can imagine at that peak lunchtime when there's
Speaker 3: a long line of people trying to get their salads.
Speaker 3: I mean, I can imagine it's speeding up the flow
Speaker 3: of things. I think that accuracy point is a pretty
Speaker 3: big one. There's no reason why the machine should make
Speaker 3: an error, so it should bring their accuracy way up.
Speaker 2: And the sort of chaos.
Speaker 3: Of twenty people moving around a store and trying to
Speaker 3: get these ingredients where they need to go and getting
Speaker 3: everything into bowls, I mean, it's real. I think it's
Speaker 3: a very chaotic food production environment, so it doesn't feel
Speaker 3: completely crazy to me.
Speaker 1: After the break, can a fast food plays be run
Speaker 1: entirely by robots? Lizzie, you said something before the break
Speaker 1: that I think is interesting that when you look at
Speaker 1: other attempts at making these automated robots to do fast food,
Speaker 1: they sometimes look like they're not working very well. And
Speaker 1: in your story you write there is kind of like
Speaker 1: a long, sad history of trying to build robots to
Speaker 1: do the things that people do.
Speaker 3: There have been a lot of food service robots that
Speaker 3: have tried and failed. There are a bunch that are
Speaker 3: being tried and have not failed yet but don't seem
Speaker 3: hugely promising. There's a zillion pizza robots. There's Zoom Pizza.
Speaker 3: It had like two hundred million dollars worth of funding
Speaker 3: from SoftBank, and the idea was it was going to
Speaker 3: be this like robotic pizza assembly line where the robotics
Speaker 3: were in the back of a pizza truck and it
Speaker 3: was going to cook the pizza while the truck drove around,
Speaker 3: and so that you got to a house and.
Speaker 2: The pizza was like perfectly cooked.
Speaker 1: So you'd order the pizza for delivery, and instead of
Speaker 1: making the pizza and hopping in the car and trying
Speaker 1: to get it to you while it's hot, it would
Speaker 1: actually be made while it was on its way to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it turns out there are a bunch of
Speaker 3: issues with trying to cook a pizza in an eight
Speaker 3: hundred degree of an on a van that roves around,
Speaker 3: so that whole operation is defunct. There's one called Stellar Pizza,
Speaker 3: and that's a group of former SpaceX engineers who are
Speaker 3: doing something kind of similar, except the truck is stationary,
Speaker 3: so they're not trying to actually cook as they drive.
Speaker 3: They seem to be having a little more success, but
Speaker 3: they still only have one truck that they're piloting the
Speaker 3: last time I checked. And then there's like pizza vending machines.
Speaker 3: There's pizza assembly lines, so pizza is a big one.
Speaker 3: There are some robotic arm prototypes that can do different
Speaker 3: things like make smoothies or make salads. Really, the biggest
Speaker 3: company in the space is a company called Miso Robotics.
Speaker 3: They had a robot named Flippy, and Flippy flipped hamburgers.
Speaker 3: Flippy wasn't so good at his job, so now there's
Speaker 3: Flippy two, and Flippy two makes French fries. So that's
Speaker 3: kind of being piloted at a couple dozen white castles
Speaker 3: in a few other places. But basically all of these
Speaker 3: efforts are in there very very early stages. There's nothing
Speaker 3: that's like threatening to take over all of the fast
Speaker 3: food industry. There's really two different areas of a fast
Speaker 3: food restaurant operation. There's what you call the front of house,
Speaker 3: which is the ordering, and then there's the back of house,
Speaker 3: which is the kitchen. So the ordering piece of this
Speaker 3: pie really has had a lot of automation. So we
Speaker 3: have smartphones now that we are often using to order
Speaker 3: through apps. You can order online. There's kiosks and restaurants,
Speaker 3: so the ordering component of the fast food restaurant that
Speaker 3: really has been dramatically changed through automation, but most of
Speaker 3: the labor in a fast food restaurant is still the
Speaker 3: cooking part of the operation. It's still in the kitchen,
Speaker 3: and that's an area where there has been very little
Speaker 3: meaningful automation. But you know, you see these headlines about
Speaker 3: a fully automated McDonald's or a taco bell that's touchless,
Speaker 3: and they're really just talking about the ordering.
Speaker 1: And the new automated Sweet Green that you've been talking
Speaker 1: about just recently opened its doors. Do you have any
Speaker 1: idea how business has been.
Speaker 2: So it's in Naperville, Illinois.
Speaker 3: I am not local to the area, so I haven't
Speaker 3: been able to be back to see, but I did
Speaker 3: see some Instagram reels of lines out the door on
Speaker 3: opening day. People are intrigued. I think there's probably a
Speaker 3: lot of interest in the technology and seeing exactly what
Speaker 3: it is and how it works, and then it will
Speaker 3: kind of remain to be seen how people feel about
Speaker 3: it in the long run.
Speaker 1: You got a chance when you were there to kind
Speaker 1: of see it in action. How'd you feel about it?
Speaker 3: I arrived with the skeptics mindset, because you know, I'm
Speaker 3: a food reporter. I care a lot about food and restaurants,
Speaker 3: and I think that a big part of food is
Speaker 3: about connection and it's about people. And I still believe
Speaker 3: that's true, but it in this context. You know, when
Speaker 3: I walk into a Sweet Green, what I'm really there
Speaker 3: to do is get a healthy, fast meal where I
Speaker 3: feel the ingredients are high quality. And the fact that
Speaker 3: it's being physically assembled by a person. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: not something that makes a huge difference to me. When
Speaker 3: people think about automation, and specifically about robotics, oftentimes the
Speaker 3: first place their minds go is about job losses and
Speaker 3: replacing humans, and they're being sort of a mass exodus
Speaker 3: of jobs. When we actually look at the trend historically
Speaker 3: from nineteen ninety to today, the number of food service
Speaker 3: jobs has almost doubled. Think about everything that's happened in
Speaker 3: terms of food service automation and kiosks and online ordering,
Speaker 3: and then innovations like automatic espresso machines and all these
Speaker 3: little things that kind of help businesses run more efficiently.
Speaker 2: It really suggests that.
Speaker 3: The overall trend is not going to be towards jobs
Speaker 3: in the sector being reduced.
Speaker 1: So you cover this industry, do you think that automation
Speaker 1: eventually starts taking over more and more functions, and that
Speaker 1: we're going to be seeing a lot more robots at
Speaker 1: the fast food places we go to.
Speaker 3: Probably eventually robotics and automation will play a bigger role
Speaker 3: in food service. I think this is probably going to
Speaker 3: happen relatively slowly. Sweet Green and businesses like it. Any
Speaker 3: place that makes a bowl or a salad, they have
Speaker 3: some aspects of their menus that make them particularly suited
Speaker 3: for this kind of automation, Like you can have an
Speaker 3: infinite kitchen robot that makes every item on the menu.
Speaker 3: Most fast casual and fast food restaurants, their menus aren't
Speaker 3: like that. There are dozens of different discrete tasks that
Speaker 3: need to be done to create order, from flipping a
Speaker 3: hamburger to assembling the hamburger and pouring's fountain drinks and
Speaker 3: frying off fries. I don't see a future where five
Speaker 3: years from now we're walking into a McDonald's or a
Speaker 3: Wendy's or Taco Bell and it's just a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of machines in the back. But I do think in
Speaker 3: the fullness of time, I guess anything is possible.
Speaker 1: Liz, thanks so much for coming on the.
Speaker 2: Show, Thanks so much for having me when.
Speaker 1: We come back. Where workers and the shortage of them
Speaker 1: fit into this puzzle? As we all know, companies are
Speaker 1: having trouble finding people willing to take fast food and
Speaker 1: some other service industry jobs. The pay and benefits and
Speaker 1: the hours are often not great. At the same time, though,
Speaker 1: some people who do work in the service industry fear
Speaker 1: that robots are coming for their jobs. But are they really?
Speaker 1: Danielliser Tory Cortina knows a thing or two about this.
Speaker 1: She covers the restaurant industry for Bloomberg. Danielle will we
Speaker 1: hear a lot about how the fast food industry is
Speaker 1: struggling to recruit enough employees to fill all these restaurants.
Speaker 1: Can you just kind of paint us a picture of
Speaker 1: this nine hundred billion dollar food service industry. What's it
Speaker 1: like right now in terms of recruiting and trying to
Speaker 1: keep the employees they have?
Speaker 4: Several chains have said recently that their employee turnover, so
Speaker 4: the number of people who leave has actually declined a
Speaker 4: little bit from last year, and they've achieved that by improving,
Speaker 4: you know, their training, and they've also race wages. The
Speaker 4: economy has also softened like a little bit, and so
Speaker 4: now the share of Americans that are in the workforce
Speaker 4: has been edging up a little bit. Now, with the
Speaker 4: not so positive part, we have US government data that
Speaker 4: showed that as of March, there were about one point
Speaker 4: three million job openings in the restaurant on accommodations sector.
Speaker 4: So that's like a broader industry, but that's higher than
Speaker 4: the roughly eight hundred and seventy five thousand positions that
Speaker 4: were open in.
Speaker 2: Twenty nineteen on average.
Speaker 4: So even though the situation has been improving, there's still
Speaker 4: that gap when it comes to restaurant employment.
Speaker 1: So why is it that restaurants and fast foods have
Speaker 1: been so hard hit? Why are they struggling to recruit
Speaker 1: and keep.
Speaker 4: Pable so there's more choice, for one, and second, I mean,
Speaker 4: restaurant work has always been tough. You know, pay can
Speaker 4: be lower than in other industries. The jobs are difficult.
Speaker 4: You know, people spend a lot of time on their feet,
Speaker 4: working in hot kitchens, dealing with the public directly, and
Speaker 4: you know customers sometimes have specific demands that are hard
Speaker 4: to meet. Those are some of the factors that also
Speaker 4: contribute to making it harder to get people to join
Speaker 4: restaurants and stick. And also the schedules can be very unpredictable.
Speaker 4: Unlike other industries, restaurants have increased pay over the past
Speaker 4: couple of years because they know that they're competing for
Speaker 4: a bunch of different workers. And so just to give
Speaker 4: you a little bit of data, in the US, on
Speaker 4: average for workers in limited service restaurants, so you know,
Speaker 4: places like McDonald's, the hourly wages were in March around
Speaker 4: fifteen thirty four. That's actually up almost five percent from
Speaker 4: a year ago and twenty two percent from two years ago.
Speaker 4: So restaurants have increased wages, and even then, it's still
Speaker 4: hard to find people.
Speaker 1: And so here we are talking about restaurants starting to
Speaker 1: try to use more automation. How much of that is
Speaker 1: about trying to make up for this gap between the
Speaker 1: number of people they need to work at the restaurants
Speaker 1: and the number of people they're able to find to work
Speaker 1: at their restaurants.
Speaker 4: It's part of it, you know. I had conversations with
Speaker 4: people across the restaurant industry, from restaurants to consultants to economists,
Speaker 4: just to give you a little bit of context. White Castle,
Speaker 4: which makes burgers, which they call Slighters, has a robot
Speaker 4: called Flippy that can make fried items, so things like
Speaker 4: chicken rings, like potato fries, and they've put these robots
Speaker 4: in about twelve of their three hundred and fifty restaurants.
Speaker 4: White Castle is open twenty for seven. So what they
Speaker 4: told us is that having the robot in some of
Speaker 4: these restaurants means that they're never understaffed, especially in the
Speaker 4: late night shift, which is hard to staff. So that's
Speaker 4: one point that restaurants are making. That being said, labor's
Speaker 4: not the whole story. We talked to a restaurant consultant
Speaker 4: called Kriz Berley who's at PAIN and he said that
Speaker 4: it's not even the main reason, at least in his view.
Speaker 4: A big factor is also that the way that people
Speaker 4: acts as restaurants really changed a lot during the pandemic,
Speaker 4: and so there are things like ordering ahead, going to
Speaker 4: a drive through, and broadly just getting more food on
Speaker 4: the go that became so much more popular. And so
Speaker 4: Beerley said that a lot of the automation that's happening
Speaker 4: in the restaurants is around like apps and other systems
Speaker 4: that allow restaurants to deliver on those new consumer expectations.
Speaker 4: A little bit more smoothly, you know, just to put
Speaker 4: it in the words of Wendy's. We spoke to on
Speaker 4: executive there and they told us that basically, quick service
Speaker 4: restaurants when based on three factors accuracy, convenience, and speed.
Speaker 4: So they're looking to automate functions that help them improve
Speaker 4: on any of those points, and so enter things like
Speaker 4: AI in the drive through with a chatbot that communicates
Speaker 4: with people so they can order that way.
Speaker 1: How does that actually work? What are they investing in?
Speaker 4: Wendy's is doing a pilot, and that pilot actually has
Speaker 4: not started, so it's starting in June of this year.
Speaker 4: And so what they've told us is that basically, you know,
Speaker 4: you pull up to the drive through and there's a
Speaker 4: robotic voice, which is going to be female, that's going
Speaker 4: to take your order. And supposedly that robot will understand
Speaker 4: the orders even if they're not placed exactly like they're
Speaker 4: listed on the menu. So, for example, Wendy's has milkshakes
Speaker 4: that they called Frosty's, So even if you order a milkshake,
Speaker 4: it will understand that it's a Frosty, right, That's how
Speaker 4: it's supposed to work. And so after that you know,
Speaker 4: there is a menu board in which you can see
Speaker 4: whether what you ordered is reflected on the text. One
Speaker 4: important point is that at least for this pilot, which
Speaker 4: will be in one store in Ohio, there will be
Speaker 4: a person monitoring the AI just in case there are
Speaker 4: any issues or if someone just wants to talk to
Speaker 4: a person.
Speaker 1: What do we know about how customers feel about this.
Speaker 1: Do they want to interact with AI and robots or
Speaker 1: do they like having that person standing behind the counter
Speaker 1: taking their roder at the cash register.
Speaker 4: It can be a little bit early to know, but
Speaker 4: we have a couple of data points. So White Castle,
Speaker 4: in addition to Flippy, the actual robot that makes right items,
Speaker 4: does have an AI chap book called Julia, which can
Speaker 4: take orders. And so what they told us is that
Speaker 4: ninety percent of the customers that have used the AI
Speaker 4: actually complete the order without going and asking for a person.
Speaker 4: So that's a good data point, I mean, and they
Speaker 4: see it as sort of like customer acceptance for that
Speaker 4: type of product. At the same time, there was a
Speaker 4: survey by a research firm called in Touch Insight that
Speaker 4: found that around half of the people that they pulled
Speaker 4: took issue with the technology for one reason or the other,
Speaker 4: one of them being the lack of human interaction. At
Speaker 4: this same time, not everyone who had an opinion had
Speaker 4: actually tested the AI, so that just muddies the picture
Speaker 4: a little bit. Other technologies that are public facing in
Speaker 4: the restaurant space, like you know, the big touch screens
Speaker 4: that you might see when you walk into McDonald's so
Speaker 4: you can place an order on your own and pay
Speaker 4: without having to necessarily interact with a person. Intoch Insight,
Speaker 4: the same research firm found that seventy percent of the
Speaker 4: people that they polled have interacted with one such service,
Speaker 4: you know, those like self checkout chios. Though many people
Speaker 4: did prefer talking to a person if given the choice,
Speaker 4: and older customers had a much more stronger preference for
Speaker 4: interacting with a human than younger customers did.
Speaker 1: If we do start to see more technology doing the
Speaker 1: jobs that people are currently doing, now, do you think
Speaker 1: ultimately that means we're going to start seeing fewer people
Speaker 1: in restaurants and more automation.
Speaker 4: One important point to keep in mind is that it's
Speaker 4: still early days. A lot of restaurants are trying AI
Speaker 4: and to drive through, but it's not like it's wide
Speaker 4: spread across the entire industry. Yet in that regard, I
Speaker 4: think we still have to wait and.
Speaker 2: See a little bit.
Speaker 4: The broader question of whether there will be fewer jobs
Speaker 4: in the restaurant industry depends on who you ask, and
Speaker 4: so what I have found this time around is that restaurants,
Speaker 4: you know, told me again and again that they're not
Speaker 4: looking to reduce the size of their labor force. They
Speaker 4: make the point that currently they don't have enough people
Speaker 4: to work at their restaurants, and what they're looking to
Speaker 4: do is hopefully free up people to do other tasks. So,
Speaker 4: for example, Wendy's told us that instead of having someone
Speaker 4: scrambling to take orders, what they want is to reallocate
Speaker 4: people to do other tests, like, for example, checking the
Speaker 4: accuracy of your order to make sure that what you
Speaker 4: get handed is actually what you ordered. At the same time,
Speaker 4: I also spoke with Simon Johnson, who's an economist at MIT.
Speaker 4: He did say that there's uncertainty about what automation will
Speaker 4: mean for employment. In his view, it will eventually result
Speaker 4: in a reduced need for labor. What happens next really
Speaker 4: depends on what shape automation takes, and so from his perspective.
Speaker 4: What he said is that the type of automation that's
Speaker 4: happening now kind of across the economy is primarily designed
Speaker 4: at replicating tasks that humans can do without necessarily adding
Speaker 4: new tasks, and so he said that it's possible the
Speaker 4: new tasks will emerge, which is kind of what restaurants
Speaker 4: are saying that the annual to reallocate staff to do
Speaker 4: other tasks. But in Johnson's view, the technology is just
Speaker 4: advancing so fast that more jobs could be lost faster
Speaker 4: without there being in enough time for new tasks to emerge.
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