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).

At first bite, it seems no more than a clever way to boost sales at the expense of a competitor. When a hungry customer walks into a McDonald's (or within 600 feet of one), they can use the Burger King app to order a Whopper for a penny. The app will then provide directions to the nearest BK, where the now famished customer can pick it up. The promotion, good until December 12, is called the Whopper Detour. Burger King's marketing chief told CNN Business that more than 50,000 people have cashed in on the deal, and the fast food giant's app jumped to first place in the iTunes App Store's Food and Drink category.

As the marketing manager of Burger King, Marcelo Pascoa, explained to AdWeek's website, the idea was to attract the attention of the viewers by surprising them with something obviously far-fetched, but still current and fun: "AI, bot, machine learning, algorithms for deep learning, blockchain and more: these are all topics that we face in assessing the future of marketing. But we must avoid getting lost in the sea of technological innovations and fashionable words, forgetting what really matters. And this is the idea. Artificial intelligence can not replace the great creative ideas that come to mind to real people. The Burger King commercials, deceitful and apparently harmless, capture a central aspect in our relationship with the new complicated technologies and the still very blurred outlines, on which it is difficult to get an idea. In this sense, AI is an exemplary case: we are talking about it continuously and this is what the largest investments in the Silicon Valley and in China are focusing on, yet there is still a big difference between what we read in the press releases that celebrate the great progress achieved by artificial intelligence systems and our daily experiences.

Each of Burger King's new ads starts with an anachronistic burst of noise from a dial-up modem and a solemn warning: "This ad was created by artificial intelligence." Then, over shots of glistening burgers and balletic fries, a robotic-sounding narrator deploys exactly the sort of clunky grammar and conceptual malapropisms we expect from a dumb AI. "The chicken crossed the road to become a sandwich. Burger King encouraged the chicken," says the voice. In a press release, Burger King claims the videos are the work of a "new deep learning algorithm," but an article from AdAge makes it clear that humans -- not machines -- are responsible for the funnies. "Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for a great creative idea coming from a real person," Burger King's global head of brand marketing, Marcelo Pascoa, told the publication.

The new campaign has quite decently mocked at technology taking the world by storm. They have made their viewers believe that each video from the series has been created through artificial intelligence. Whereas in reality none of them has been created through artificial intelligence. Originally these ads were created and designed by David Miami – the company behind the previous Net Neutrality-themed campaign of burger king with tempting and mouthwatering pictures. The most exciting thing about these campaigns is the way Burger King is playing around on social media by making statements, telling people that they trained a machine to script all this nonsense.