Customer Experience & AI
AI Is Now Teaching Humans How to Be Human
I didn’t start out to write a series of articles about AI and customer service, but the universe keeps giving me more material, so I feel obliged to continue pontificating.
On February 26, 2026, Burger King (BK) announced a new AI assistant named Patty—love the name!
What will Patty do?
As reported at the time, Burger King was testing Patty’s ability to recognize hospitality phrases such as “welcome” and “thank you” and provide managers with insights to support better customer service.
Essentially, Patty will help train BK employees to provide better customer service.
That got me thinking about how we arrived at this point.
I find the chronology of the relationship between AI and customer service amazing.
It began with early interactive voice response systems: Press 1 for Sales. Press 2 for Customer Service. Most people simply wanted to talk to a real person.
Then came more advanced voice response systems that could understand spoken English. Again, many people still just wanted to talk to a real person.
Now we have ATMs instead of bank tellers, self-checkout at grocery stores, apps on our phones, and kiosks at restaurants. The list goes on and on—technology replacing humans.
As I said in my previous articles, customer service has become so bad—or, if I'm being charitable, so unpredictable—that I often prefer the kiosk or the app to the real person because I know what I’m getting: accuracy, consistency, and efficiency. If I pick a human, I might get rudeness or condescension.
In my article titled Humanoid Robot Server, I posited:
"Maybe companies are not only replacing people because robots are less expensive, more efficient, and more predictable than humans. Maybe they're replacing people because too many humans have lost the capability or the desire to interact with other humans in a fun and engaging manner, making it increasingly difficult for employers to expect—let alone require—that level of customer service."
Now, here comes BK striving to rebrand itself and create a better customer experience, which I applaud. Instead of eliminating humans with robots, they're trying to hold their employees to a higher standard through additional training.
The twist? Instead of humans training humans, they're using AI to help train humans how to better interact with other humans.
What this signals to me is a shortage of people who both have the capability and the desire to interact with customers in a fun and engaging manner. Kudos to BK for recognizing the problem and looking for a creative way to solve it.
The part I find disturbing is that we've reached a point where AI is needed to teach humans how to better interact with other humans.
AI isn't the problem. It's simply filling a gap that shouldn't exist in the first place.
If you missed my first two articles in this series, you can find them here:
The Customer No-Service Economy
Taken together, they trace the evolution of customer service—from removing people, to replacing people, to now using AI to teach people how to better serve people.