By Tara Deschamps
When you stop at a Burger King later this year, staff may have an artificial intelligence-based coach in their ears.
Restaurant Brands International, the owner of the fast-food giant, revealed Thursday that it is bringing its new Patty tool to Canada in the second half of 2026.
Patty is a voice-based assistant which will be piped through the headsets Burger King staff wear, listening to their conversations and prodding them toward more attentive customer service and efficiency.
The tool will be able to remind employees how to make food orders and help them upsell customers.
Patty can also prompt staff to remove items from digital menus or app ordering when products are unavailable, and alert them to washrooms that need cleaning or a drink machine that’s out of a certain flavour.
Before Patty, it would take workers more than a day to replace the flavour cartridge but with the tool, that timeline gets shaved down to one hour, said Patrick Doyle, RBI’s executive chairman.
The tool also puts service under the microscope because it’s listening to employee interactions to uncover room for improvement.
“Are they being friendly? Are they saying welcome? Are they saying thank you for coming to Burger King?” Doyle told a crowd assembled in Miami for RBI’s annual investor day.
“It is extraordinary. It is a game changer in terms of how you run restaurants.”
The tool powered by OpenAI is currently being piloted in 500 Burger King restaurants in the U.S. but will soon spread more widely.
Burger King intends to launch it at all of its U.S. restaurants by the end of this year and at many of its 380 stores north of the border around the same time, the chain’s spokesperson Kristen Viersen said in an email to The Canadian Press.
David Pullara, a business consultant and marketing instructor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, applauded RBI for experimenting with AI, but worried Patty will demand too much multi-tasking from workers.
“As any parent can confirm, it’s nearly impossible to give your full attention to a conversation when you have a second little voice in your ear trying to tell you something,” he said in an email.
“Will customers be expected to wait patiently until Patty finishes prompting cashiers on how to upsell their orders? Talk about taking the ‘fast’ out of ‘fast food.'”
Pullara thought it would be better to use Patty as a training tool, when customers aren’t waiting to be served. It could help employees learn how to make limited-time menu offers or facilitate role-playing scenarios, he said.
News of Patty’s expansion came as RBI, which also owns Tim Hortons, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs, also announced it aims to open between 300 and 400 net new restaurants in Canada and the U.S. per year by 2028.
Firehouse Subs is expected to contribute around half of the net new units, with 150 to 200 per year. The remaining restaurants will be roughly split between Popeyes and Tim Hortons — a brand RBI said has room to grow in Western Canada and Quebec.
RBI said it will shift its business model across all its restaurants globally to be 99 per cent franchised by 2028.
More than 95 per cent of the conglomerate’s locations are currently franchised, Viersen said.
