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It didn't take long for Harshraj Ghai to respond to the impact of California's new 20 an hour minimum wage for his 3,700 fast-food employees. Ghai and his family operate 180 Burger Kings, Taco Bells and Popeyes chicken restaurants across the state, and one of the first things they did after the law took effect April 1 was to start capping workers' hours to avoid overtime pay. Also, they're closing some outlets a little earlier, and opening others a bit later to avoid paying workers for less profitable periods. But the biggest thing Ghai and his family are doing does not directly involve workers at all: They've speeded up and expanded their use of technology, especially AI. With the state's mandatory minimum wage for fast-food workers set to increase to 20 an hour, many restaurant chains are preparing to raise prices.

McDonald's wants to improve drive-thru speeds -- to help customers, of course, but also in hopes of getting them to show up more often and spend more when they visit. It's the latest move by the fast-food giant in using technology such as artificial intelligence and the introduction of "meat" created from plant protein to drive more business. Earlier this week, the chain unveiled its plans for a better drive-thru experience during an investor update. It's testing express lines for people who place digital orders ahead of time, as well as dedicated pickup spots and automated ordering. The drive-thru has become even more important for restaurant chains during the pandemic, when people want to avoid dining rooms and prefer contactless payment.

Drive-thru is a popular sales channel in the fast food industry where consumers can make food purchases without leaving their cars. Drive-thru recommendation systems allow restaurants to display food recommendations on the digital menu board as guests are making their orders. Popular recommendation models in eCommerce scenarios rely on user attributes (such as user profiles or purchase history) to generate recommendations, while such information is hard to obtain in the drive-thru use case. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new recommendation model Transformer Cross Transformer (TxT), which exploits the guest order behavior and contextual features (such as location, time, and weather) using Transformer encoders for drive-thru recommendations. Empirical results show that our TxT model achieves superior results in Burger King's drive-thru production environment compared with existing recommendation solutions. In addition, we implement a unified system to run end-to-end big data analytics and deep learning workloads on the same cluster. We find that in practice, maintaining a single big data cluster for the entire pipeline is more efficient and cost-saving. Our recommendation system is not only beneficial for drive-thru scenarios, and it can also be generalized to other customer interaction channels.

One of the strangest slogan created by the AI robot is'Chicken Fries For Creep King' Burger King's advertising team has enlisted the help of an AI robot to write the slogans for its latest TV adverts. The fast-food brand is testing a beta version of a new deep learning algorithm to develop a series of adverts. Researchers trained the algorithm to write slogans by feeding it thousands of fast-food commercials, as well as reports from industry research. Using this data, the algorithm, was able to identify key patterns of slogans that worked and didn't work, and develop its own. However, the results are somewhat questionable.

Would you buy a 43-inch TV that works in vertical mode? Why didn't you buy Anki's cute toy robots? When are you going to try that meatless Burger King Whopper? Cozmo and Vector couldn't save it.Anki is closing the doors on its toy-robot business Anki, the startup responsible for adorable robotics, is closing its doors and will terminate nearly 200 employees Wednesday. Recode reported CEO Boris Sofman broke the news to staff Monday.

When it comes to the creative side of advertising, the promise of artificial intelligence--that it could create ads optimized in every possible way--has mostly been the subject of satire. Twitter gave birth to a meme about forcing bots to watch 1,000 hours of programming to write hilariously flawed (and fictional) scripts, and Burger King took the joke mainstream by making an ad campaign supposedly written by AI, which celebrated a chicken sandwich that "tastes like bird." In launching that campaign, Burger King's global head of brand management, Marcelo Pascoa, noted, "Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for a great creative idea coming from a real person." Now Lexus has put that claim to the test. The automaker and agency The&Partnership have created what they describe as the first ad both written by an AI and directed by an Oscar winner (Kevin Macdonald, who won Best Documentary for One Day in September in 2000).