Hold on to your Pumpkin Spice Lattes, because Starbucks is shutting down its AI tool after a completely disastrous, reuters reportsLess than a year after its launch.
The tool, which was deployed in its North American stores, was designed to automate inventory management with the goal of providing accurate real-time information that can help Starbucks address ingredient shortages at its locations.
but according to Of earlier reuters reportingError-prone AI often makes miscalculations and mislabels items, causing different types of milk to get confused and sometimes forgetting to count them altogether.
Now, it’s getting the axe.
“Starting today, the automatic calculations will be turned off,” reads an internal company newsletter obtained by the news agency on Monday. “Beverage components and milk will now be counted the same way you count other inventory categories in your coffeehouse.”
Running just nine months, the AI experiment stuck around longer than some of the coffee chain’s seasonal beverage offerings, but didn’t even come close to the level of lasting revolutionary impact the technology promised, or indeed the company was hoping for. You also have to wonder whether a human employee who can’t even do minimal counting would be shown anywhere near as much leeway as AI gets in the chain. Notorious for union busting.
In any case, this is a quick turnaround from Starbucks. I told you in February itself reuters AI has already helped improve product availability. On Thursday, it explained only that the end of the AI program was “part of a decision to standardize how inventory is calculated across coffeehouses as we continue to focus on consistency and execution at scale.”
The tool, created by Nomadgo, was intended to allow employees to “count everything in your inventory… with a wave of a smartphone or tablet,” its website claims. In practice, employees placed a company tablet in front of shelves filled with ingredients like syrup and milk, and the app scanned it with lidar and a camera. reuters.
Even in practice: it didn’t always work. In an embarrassing omen of things to come, the bottle of peppermint syrup failed to be recognized in the official video uploaded by Starbucks when the collaboration was announced.
It’s the latest questionable example of restaurants, an industry far removed from technology, 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 it dramatically slowed delivery times and caused more than $100 million in damages.
This also isn’t Starbucks’ first foray into technology. 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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