Hungry Jacks sparks outrage over major change at drive-thru in Australia

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

A new trial at Hungry Jack's could mark the beginning of the end for a key fast food job.
Hungry Jack's is trialling the use of AI drive-thru assistants at its St Peters restaurant in Sydney, and those wanting a meal will experience a digital voice-activated customer ordering system.
The trial will be rolled out to other restaurants in the coming months, and many Aussies have started to question how many fast food workers will lose their jobs in the future.
AI expert Niusha Shafiabady told Yahoo Finance that retail jobs were 'very likely' to change soon as AI begins to take over.
'At this stage, people are preparing our food, in the future robots will be preparing our food,' Ms Shafiabady said.
'I would anticipate with the work that Elon Musk is doing in developing humanoid robots that even within the next 10 years people wouldn't be preparing our food.'
Restaurants around the world, including KFC, Wendy's, McDonald's, Chipotle, Domino's, and Taco Bell, have trialled AI software.
Ms Shafiabady said AI would ultimately save businesses money but also reduce wait times.
He said it would also take human error out of the equation, meaning orders would be more accurate and Aussies wouldn't have to turn their cars around and go back to claim a missing hamburger or chips.
A Hungry Jack's spokesperson told Yahoo Finance the trial was put in place to see how effective AI technology was in helping 'service improvements'.
Some Aussies online were outraged and worried about the new 'scary' AI technology and some even threatened to boycott Hungry Jack's over the trial.
'Goodbye to teenagers who need casual jobs,' one person said.
'How will kids get job experience with these jobs being replaced?' another said.
'You can't convince me all this investment in AI is cheaper than paying real wages,' a third said.
Ms Shafiabady said the public would eventually accept AI's role in society.
'Even if they (Hungry Jack's) lose some of their customers in the beginning, people would get used to the technology,' she said.
'If you recall the first time that generative AI tools came to the market, like ChatGPT, people were not really comfortable using it. But now everybody's using them.'
Other jobs that are expected to be impacted by AI in the next five years are bank tellers, cashiers, postal workers and administrative assistants, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report.
The report predicted about 170million new jobs would be created this decade while 92million would be lost.
Ms Shafiabady said the jobs involving repetitive tasks were the ones that would be most likely to be taken over by AI.
She also said that while there would be fewer entry-level jobs in the future, AI would open up new job opportunities, with roles in automation, cybersecurity experts and people needed to analyse data.
'That's the reality. The types of jobs of the future will be different from the types of jobs that we have had now, and we have had before,' she said.
'If you look back hundreds of years ago, the types of jobs were different, so we are evolving and the types of jobs will be changing.'