Post
Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit
https://www.businessinsider.com/pizza-hut-ai-system-dragontail-lawsuit-franchisee-2026-5
> A top Pizza Hut franchisee says the chain's rollout of an AI-powered delivery system turned once-speedy pizza orders into a cold, late-arriving mess — and cratered a business that had been outperforming nearly every other operator in the system.
@rysiek The way this fuckup happened, reminds of a funny but true story.
When I was student (half a century ago), I participated in a programming competition. (PCs didn't exist back then; we wrote programs in FORTRAN for a mainframe.) The task was to write an algorithm for a machine that returns change. The input data was how many coins and banknotes of each denomination the machine had, and a list of values it had to return. The algorithm had to be clever enough so that if it couldn't use the minimal amount of coins and banknotes, it had to switch to other amounts, using the available quantities. The condition said "process as many transactions as possible", obviously meaning the above level of cleverness.
Well, one chap took the condition way too literally. His program buffered all the change requests until there were no more and *then* re-ordered them, in order to fulfill as many as possible with the available money/denominations.
While it clearly "optimized" things, in real life it would have lead to idiotic delays, just like this case with drivers waiting for all the pizzas to be ready.
@rysiek @LoganFive Sounds like it’s more like $100m in lost revenue that was stolen from gig workers to begin with.
@FeloniousPunk @LoganFive no doubt. The root cause is capitalism.
@rysiek Isn't this funny. Some corporate suit went all in with Ai to save hundreds of millions and instead of this idiot getting fired without any bonuses, they'll just fire 5000 people to compensate for the fuckup. And the idiot who pushed this, even if he leaves the company, he's leaving it with a bonus. Fuck up and even be rewarded for it. It's totally fucked way of doing business.
@rysiek Put a robot to do a human’s job..
When possible, use archive.org
archive.today also owns the urls:
archive.fo
archive.is
archive.li
archive.md
archive.ph
archive.vn
Archive.today has begun rolling out Google's reCaptcha as well, which is concerning when it can be altered.
I do not have evidence, but I can see how this could possibly be a malware vector in the future.
@rysiek Not exactly right: “Instead of immediately leaving with a completed order, the suit claims drivers waited ‘up to fifteen (15) minutes’ for additional deliveries, increasing the time between when a pizza is removed from the oven rack and when it leaves the building to be delivered. The lawsuit also alleges Dashers could see tip amounts and whether orders were cash payments, making some drivers less likely to accept certain deliveries.”
The AI software did exactly what it was supposed to do. The delivery drivers were never meant to have that much access.
@mighty_orbot pretty exactly right actually – AI software was integrated poorly and without properly assessing the consequences, leading to a bad outcome.
I am going to *bet* there was someone there saying "but this will cause this exact problem" and was silenced "because AI".
@rysiek If you read further...
> The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems, allowing them to see when pizzas would come out of the oven.
> Instead of immediately leaving with a completed order, the suit claims drivers waited "up to fifteen (15) minutes" for additional deliveries, increasing the time between when a pizza is removed from the oven rack and when it leaves the building to be delivered. That delay slowed deliveries, disappointed customers, and caused a sharp drop in sales, the suit says.
@haliphax and if you read earlier:
> In a lawsuit filed on May 6 in Texas Business Court, franchisee Chaac Pizza Northeast accused Pizza Hut of forcing stores to adopt Dragontail, a delivery-management platform that Pizza Hut described as using artificial intelligence to "optimize" food delivery, despite what the suit calls obvious incompatibilities with Chaac's business model.
Dragontail is an "AI" startup, so this is a case of integrating an AI boondoggle poorly leading to a bad outcome.
@rysiek
If you read the article it's claiming that exposing details to the door dashers was the major issue.
@notyourfanboy and that exposure was caused by integrating an AI boondoggle (Dragontail) poorly and without understanding the full extent of consequences.
@rysiek
It's a systems design issue, which can appear in any poorly designed system.
It's not AI specific. It just happened they used AI this time.
It's topical to blame ai at the moment. Which is fine.
@rysiek I love how, on top of a forced AI system, just plain old greed and capitalist optimization attempts backfired. Seems the business of business should sometimes be just delivering pizza. Not batch processing stale, cold messes. 
Can't wait for all the "no but it's not the AI, they implemented it wrong" replies.
Somehow whenever slop generators are involved, however incidentally, in something that can be claimed to work, it's "AI DID A THING".
But when they end up causing problems it's "human error" or "implemented it poorly" or some other form of good old "you're holding it wrong". 
Wow that's a lot of "but actually it's not AI's fault!" responses. :blobcatgiggle:
So let me explain:
1. Gig workers do not get paid nearly enough
2. Pizza Hut decides to deploy some AI boondoggle ("Dragontail") without thinking it through, believing the BS about "optimizing delivery with AI"
3. Gig workers find a way to play the system
4. ???
5. Lawsuit
Gig workers should have been paid more in the first place, but this is still an example of how jumping on the AI hype train can screw you.
@rysiek «The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems»
This sounds like a way to extract money from restaurants and pump it into the gatekeepers' bank accounts (a joint DoorDash/Pizza Hut goal I presume).
@rysiek 2000s online libertarians became cryptobros, became AI enthusiasts, their thing never works because it hasn't been tried, and when it has been tried, it hasn't been tried correctly, in a magical world free of all the structures these things need to even exist in the first place, and where people act exactly like they're told to in order to get perfect results.
@rysiek you had me at "holding it wrong."
@rysiek But Rysiek, isn't the important part all the bonuses some C-levels got for AI adoption metrics?
@rysiek having this exact thing from people about a post from someone who says their (assuming US) company denied them their monthly pay because the AI output claimed they'd been slacking off (having clocked off early one time for a medical thing).
Oh well that's just a bad company.
I mean, yes. But. Now they're worse.
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