You might have seen viral videos of Wendy’s drive-thru customers in the United States ordering their fast food from the firm’s generative AI bot Wendy’s FreshAI.Most show a very human-like transaction punctuated with cries of amazement at how fast, accurate and polite the system is.While the system and others like it are in their infancy, and some still rely heavily on human assistance, retailers are investing huge sums in AI to replace human workers.Why the rush to automate? It might seem like it’s all about slashing the wage bill, and straight AI-for-human swaps are indeed happening in many roles.But there is another force driving the tsunami of restructuring in retail. At stake is the hidden lifeblood of the 21st-century business: data.Superhuman data harvestersRetail employees don’t typically feed much data back into a business. Instead data flow shapes them personally, and they develop what we recognise as experience or expertise. This is one of the reasons businesses traditionally try to retain employees for long periods.Retail AI bots, on the other hand, completely automate data collection. The bot is part of a business’s broader computer system, so the details of every customer interaction can be piped straight to a database. The data harvest can include the complete “stimulus” presented to each customer: the initial greeting, the volume, the tone, the pacing, responses to customer questions, and of course the dollar and cents outcome.Depending on a firm’s ethical position, an AI bot can also be designed to harvest not only the customer’s words but also various “meta-facts”: male or female, young or old, thin or obese, short or tall, tattoos or no tattoos.In fact, with video and audio recording so commonplace, there is no reason everything about an interaction can’t be captured for later breakdown and analysis by AI.By substituting bots for humans, all the data that once ended up in employees (who, possessing the data as expertise, might demand more money to stay) can now go straight into the electronic vaults of the business.What makes the business case for AI bots even more compelling, however, is that they can complete the loop and use the data as well as harvest it.Dynamic “touchpoint” creatorsRetailers pay a lot of attention to “touchpoints” – critical moments of contact where they can influence the customer’s perceptions and decisions.In the past, human employees have been selected or trained to provide effective touchpoints

Cali Group, which is partnering with Miso Robotics, announced this month that it will soon be opening CaliExpress by Flippy, a restaurant that will be powered by artificial intelligence, in Pasadena, California, Knewz.com has learned.

Autonomous restaurants are increasingly appearing throughout North America, with several new entrants into the space in the past couple of weeks alone, despite consumers’ hesitations. Fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen opened its second automated location, featuring its “Infinite Kitchen” technology, Tuesday (Dec. 12) in Huntington Beach, according to area news outlet The Orange County Register. The new addition to the company’s 220+ restaurants around the country aims to streamline the food preparation process and enhance customer experience, creating a maximum of 500 meals an hour and working 50% faster than human employees