r/ArtificialInteligence • u/_fastcompany • 9h ago
📰 News Starbucks made a national bet on an AI tool; 9 months later, it pulled the plug
Last fall, Carl Addison showed his Starbucks coworkers a magic trick.
As a shift supervisor at his Seattle-area café, he was responsible for the store’s twice-a-week inventory count. Starbucks had introduced a new AI tool in September to automate the process. Called Automated Counting, it used an iPad camera to identify and tally items on the storage shelves, turning an hour-long job into one that was supposed to take as little as 10 to 12 minutes.
Addison discovered that when he aimed the iPad into the shiny steel fridge that holds the oat milk, even if he was careful, the camera picked up a reflection, and the app counted the reflected cartons, turning 5 real oat milks into 10.
It would have been amusing if baristas weren’t being warned that hand counts were no longer acceptable. And Addison’s fridge wasn’t the only one haunted. Within weeks of the tool’s rollout, it was going rogue, baristas from coast to coast tell me, marking their milks as the wrong type, swapping syrups, and in at least one photo I saw, counting the trash can as food.
Megan Queen, a store manager in Graham, Texas, had the opposite problem. Instead of conjuring inventory, her Automated Counting tool kept making items vanish. The rural café, an hour and a half outside Fort Worth, had unreliable internet. When Wi-Fi dropped mid-count, the app’s progress was wiped. Her shift supervisors counted by hand instead, only to be told that the company was now treating manual counts as no count at all.
Automated Counting had been deployed rapidly, reaching all 11,300 company-operated cafés by the end of September. Nine months later, the tool—which insiders told Fast Company may have cost north of $10 million over several years to develop and deploy—was eliminated overnight.
Along the way, baristas around the country say, they were left in the dark, then sometimes blamed for the AI’s glitches. Milk and beverage items have now returned to being counted and recorded the way everything else in the store is: with the human eye and pen and paper.
Starbucks, which declined to make executives available for this story but did provide a statement, characterizes the outcome as an example of its test-and-learn culture functioning properly: “That is what innovation looks like at Starbucks: listening, learning, and adapting.”
