by Rashi Shrivast**a
Like many restaurateurs, Andrew Valkanoff gives bonuses to employees who do a good job. But at his five Snow Queen franchises in North Carolina, the amount and object of those bonuses are determined by artificial intelligence.
The AI system, called Riley, collects** and audio data streams to evaluate employee performance, and then allocates bonuses to those who are able to sell more.
Less than a year ago, Valkanov installed the system, developed by Hoptix, a Rochester-based surveillance company, in the hope that it would help boost sales amid shrinking profits and soaring food and labor costs.
Valkanov said that thanks to Riley's help, his sales increased by 3 percent. "Every penny in my business counts right now. ”
Riley, which is now used by about 100 food and beverage outlets across the U.S., including franchises at KFC and Taco Bell, captures data on employee-customer conversations and uses artificial intelligence to detect if and how often employees have tried "upselling" (offering add-ons or extra toppings), "upsizing" (offering larger products) or trying to enroll customers in loyalty programs.
According to the scorecard generated by the Hoptix AI system, employees who make the most recommendations and convert them into sales will receive cash rewards. The software also tracks the speed at which meals are prepared (when the store is busiest, and when it causes long queues at fast food restaurants) and the amount of food wasted.
Ken Bianchi, founder and CEO of Hoptix, told Forbes that the tool is intended to serve as a coaching platform to help managers identify and focus on individual employees who may be underperforming and in need of further training.
Bianchi said"When you break those down to each employee, you can actually start to see who's having the highest conversion rates, who's having the lowest conversion rates, and why those employees have the highest conversion rates. It's like you've created a training platform where you can see your best employees and what they're doing. I was impressed by the resulting mechanics. ”
Some experts worry that such AI tools could be used as an excuse to demand unfair productivity standards from workers. Alexandra Mateescu, a researcher at Data and Society, a nonprofit research firm, told Forbes: "A lot of times, so-called productivity problems, especially in fast-food restaurants, are often the result of a severe shortage of staff. There is a fear that this monitoring will further squeeze workers when there is hardly anything else to squeeze. "
But that hasn't stopped the fast-food industry from opening up to AI-powered monitoring tools to record and judge workers' productivity.
In 2019, Domino's launched the Dom Pizza Checker across all of its stores in Australia and New Zealand. The inspector is an overhead camera programmed with artificial intelligence and machine learning that scans millions of pizzas to ensure workers have added the right toppings and distributed them evenly.
Outback Steakhouse, an Australian-themed casual dining chain, also uses artificial intelligence to monitor the speed at which food is served and how often waiters take care of the table. (Cathie Koch, a spokeswoman for the chain, said the chain took down the AI system months later). Some fast-food chains have also adopted other, less technical ways to measure employee performance, such as customer ratings that can determine the number and number of shifts assigned to employees, or even get them fired.
Bianchi, 48, got into the surveillance industry 20 years ago when he founded Omni Security. In 2018, Hoptix was spun off from Omni Security because the entrepreneur realized that while business owners were able to record the behavior of their employees, they didn't have time to look at the footage and gain meaningful insights from it. Bianchi is an amateur baseball player himself, and he was inspired by the sport's emphasis on data, and the team benefited greatly from detailed performance metrics for each player.
What we measure has a huge effect. "We're doing R&D and learning and replicating decades of success from other industries, and we're doing the same thing as other industries that are based on physical performance, but starting with restaurants." ”
Riley also carried out some checks to make sure the AI-transcribed audio was accurate and that facial recognition was able to identify the right employee in the interaction (the company says it is between 96 and 99 percent accurate in these areas). When the AI makes a mistake, the employee's scorecard is also linked back to the camera footage for the store manager to manually review.
But Valkanov, the owner of the Snow Queen store, said they needed to convince some of their employees. "We've never run a restaurant from a god's point of view," he said. So he earnestly answered the employee's question about "whether we are monitoring everyone's every move," he said. "But when they started to see the impact that was having on their payroll, to see their name appear on the blackboard as the weekly champion, all those problems started to go away. ”
This article is translated from. Forbes China Exclusive Manuscript, Please Do Not ** Without Permission