Starbucks Scraps Disastrous AI Tool
Hold onto your pumpkin spice lattes, because Starbucks is canning its AI tool after it turned out to be a total disaster, Reuters reports, less than year after it debuted.
The tool, which was deployed across its North American stores, was designed to automate inventory management with the goal of providing accurate real-time information that could help Starbucks address ingredient shortages at its locations.
But according to previous Reuters reporting, the error-prone AI frequently miscounted and mislabeled items, confusing different types of milk and sometimes forgetting to count them altogether.
Now, it’s getting the axe.
“Starting today, Automated Counting will be retired,” read an internal company newsletter from Monday obtained by the news agency. “Beverage components and milk will now be counted the same way you count other inventory categories in your coffeehouse.”
Having lasted just nine months, the AI experiment stuck around longer than some of the coffee chain’s seasonal drink offerings, but didn’t approach anywhere near the level of permanent revolutionary impact the tech promises, or indeed the company was hoping for. You also have to wonder if a human employee who couldn’t do the bare minimum of counting stuff would be shown anywhere near the same amount of leeway the AI got at the chain infamous for its union busting.
In any case, it’s a quick reversal from Starbucks. It was only in February that it told Reuters that the AI already helped improve product availability. On Thursday, it only explained that the AI program’s termination was part of a decision to “standardize how inventory is counted across coffeehouses as we continue to focus on consistency and execution at scale.”
The tool, built by NomadGo, was intended to allow employees to “count everything in your inventory… with just a wave of a smartphone or tablet,” its website claims. In practice, employees held up a company tablet in front of shelves stocked with ingredients like syrups and milks, and the app scanned it with lidar and a camera, per Reuters.
Also in practice: it didn’t always work. In an embarrassing augury of things to come, it failed to recognize a peppermint syrup bottle in an official video Starbucks uploaded when the collaboration was announced.
This is only the latest questionable example of restaurants, an industry far-removed from tech, trying to embrace AI that ultimately backfires. Earlier this week, one of Pizza Hut’s largest franchisees sued the pie-slinging chain over its mandatory deployment of an AI-powered kitchen management system, alleging that it dramatically slowed down delivery times and caused over $100 million in losses.
This also isn’t Starbucks first foray with the tech. Last month, it collaborated with OpenAI to allow customers to place orders through ChatGPT, a feature that quickly became a laughingstock online.
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