--- title: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after... description: Kinney Drugs is rolling back its AI phone assistant, Burt, after receiving hundreds of customer complaints about incoherent calls, incorrect dosage... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-of-customer-complaints-zpdekb9oj twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints | daily.dev og:description: Kinney Drugs is rolling back its AI phone assistant, Burt, after receiving hundreds of customer complaints about incoherent calls, incorrect dosage... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-of-customer-complaints-zpdekb9oj og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/zpDekb9OJ.png og:image:alt: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Kinney Drugs is rolling back its AI phone assistant, Burt, after receiving hundreds of customer complaints about incoherent calls, incorrect dosage information, and missed prescription notifications. Launched in May, Burt was designed to handle patient communications about prescriptions and refills. The pharmacy chain will revert to a touch-tone phone system for incoming calls. Customers also raised data privacy concerns, though the company states Burt is HIPAA compliant and does not generate or manipulate data. Burt will be retained only for opt-in outbound communications like prescription refill texts. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did Kinney Drugs stop using its AI phone assistant Burt for incoming patient calls? Kinney Drugs scaled back Burt, its AI phone assistant, after hundreds of customers reported incoherent calls, wrong medication dosages, and missed prescription refill notifications. Company president John Marraffa acknowledged that while data privacy and security were handled correctly, the overall customer experience was not, and the pharmacy chain is returning to its previous touch-tone phone system for incoming calls. _Teams weighing AI phone agents against reliability risks can track real-world rollout outcomes like this on daily.dev._ ### Is Kinney Drugs completely getting rid of its AI assistant Burt? No, Kinney Drugs is keeping Burt for outbound communications such as prescription refill texts, but only for patients who opt in to receive them. The assistant is being removed from handling incoming patient phone calls, where it caused errors, and the pharmacy chain is reverting to its classic touch-tone system for those calls instead. _Anyone deciding where AI assistants belong in customer workflows can follow cases like Burt's partial rollback on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 99 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-09-13). **TL;DR:** The community is largely critical of Kinney's AI phone rollout, viewing it as a cautionary tale of deploying immature voice AI in a high-stakes healthcare context without adequate domain expertise or fallback mechanisms. A minority of practitioners argue the technology can work when implemented carefully, but the dominant sentiment is that cost-cutting motives led to a predictably bad outcome. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 25% mixed · 65% skeptical **The case for** - One insider commenter notes that well-implemented pharmacy AI can eliminate 20+ minute hold times and meaningfully improve patient NPS scores. - Text-based (SMS) medical AI agents have shown strong results in adjacent use cases, such as reducing no-shows by 80%, suggesting the technology has real potential when scoped correctly. - Domain-expert-led implementations with pharmacist project managers can reportedly succeed where generic vendors fail. **The pushback** - Voice AI for pharmacy faces severe accuracy challenges due to drug name pronunciation variability, regional accents, and high word error rates even with state-of-the-art ASR models. - Providing incorrect dosage information in a healthcare context is a patient-safety issue, not merely a UX inconvenience — errors here can be life-threatening. - Companies deploying AI customer service simultaneously gut human escalation paths, turning minor issues into Kafkaesque loops that enrage customers. - AI phone assistants are widely experienced as worse than the IVR systems they replace, unable to handle any out-of-boundary situation (which commenters estimate is ~50% of real calls). - The pharmacy's spokesperson claiming the AI "does not generate or manipulate data" was called out as technically incoherent and misleading. - Cost-cutting motives mean companies often deploy cheap, weak models rather than capable ones, producing a poor experience that poisons perception of the technology broadly. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Strongly critical overall, with practitioners debating implementation quality while the majority condemn deploying voice AI in healthcare without robust fallback to humans and adequate domain expertise. **Hottest debate:** Whether AI phone assistants in pharmacy are a genuine lifeline for financially struggling pharmacies or an exploitative cost-cutting measure that harms patients at the expense of service quality. **Open questions** - What is the actual patient-reported satisfaction rate, given that NPS surveys only capture those who stay on the line long enough to respond? - How should liability be assigned when an AI phone assistant provides incorrect dosage information to a patient? - Is there a viable path for independent pharmacies to survive without AI-driven cost cuts, given the structural squeeze from PBMs and insurers? - What regulatory or technical standards should govern AI deployment in HIPAA-covered healthcare communications? **Highlights** > EVEN if the AI is a little rough around the edges with relational calls, just solving for transactional calls with no hold is a massive win. You keep saying that reducing call time is the "win." It seems like that the only metric you're measuring. If so, your product is a failure, not a success. This is HEALTHCARE. You don't get to do "rough around the edges." You don't get to dismiss edge cases. I also work in healthcare tech. My company doesn't permit such things because people die. I'll write it again because it's a point that tech fetishes can't get into their heads: People die. > — [reaperducer on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246999) > > People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. So I mostly avoid commenting on or pontificating about the value or lack thereof of AI, but the problem I have with companies rolling out "AI for whatever" isn't that sometimes AI gets "whatever" wrong, it's that the companies simultaneous gut the processes around correcting these mistakes. I'm currently dealing with a months-long banking error where the bank has incorrectly linked my credit card account to my wife's account and/or an account of mine in a different region, so it variously doesn't show up in my online account, shows the wrong number, shows the purchases from the wrong account, etc. Every time I call in in a 5-minute rigamarole of: "Please describe what you're calling about." "Representative." "In order to connect to a representative, please describe what you're calling about." "There's an error with my account." "Would you like to know your account balance?" "No, my credit card account is not correctly configured and isn't showing up in my online banking account." "I didn't understand. Please describe what you're calling about." Eventually the bot reaches some failure state and then allows me to wait on hold for an hour to talk to an actual rep. When I eventually get to talk to a rep, I get "Yes, I see that your account isn't correctly configured, I'll submit a back-end ticket and it should get fixed within 5-10 business days." The next week I check my online banking, my credit card still isn't showing up, and I call and repeat the entire process. So yes, it's not AI that's directly causing this Kafkaesque nightmare, but it's AI that's empowered the leaders at every utility/retailer/bank/insurer/etc. that I deal with turn their support systems into this slop. > — [Marsymars on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247060) > AI customer service doesn't fucking listen. A few years ago, I noticed that my bank had an old address on file for only one of my accounts. When I clicked edit next to the old address, it would bring me to a page that had the correct address. At the time, they had a real person handling their support. The real person told me this was just a glitch and that my correct address was on file and everything is fine. That wasn't actually true. A new debit card to replace my expiring one ended up being sent to the old address a couple of months ago. So I go back to the website to try to edit it one last time. Same problem. I call them and get their fucking stupid AI slopbot. Still, I explain the whole situation: > I'm trying to update my address on the website. When I click the edit link next to the old address, it shows my new address instead. I need to remove the old address. What did the slopbot decide to say? Oh well, I should go on the website and edit my address of course! I gave it two more chances by trying to explain it a different way and how this didn't work. Did it accept that and escalate the issue to a human? No. It kept telling me to go to the website. I had to say > Hey you fucking bitch, how many times do I have to tell you that doesn't fucking work? Escalate this to a fucking human before I get the attorney general involved. to finally get a live person to fix it (I actually had to do this twice, the first set of fucks, the slopbot forgot what problem I was having and needed a refresher!). Suffice it to say, I will never trust any large amount of money with this bank again. I'm highly skeptical of any company using AI CS now, because this is one of my many experiences where the slopbot is incapable of recognizing a complex situation outside of its capabilities. I mean look at this situation: their AI slopbot turned this one mistake into 5 mistakes instead of just allowing it to be one that another human corrects. It's gotten to the point where whenever I see someone lauding AI customer support, I just assume they have an investment/job that hinges on people liking it and/or their only experiences are using it as a glorified refund button. > — [dqv on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247053) > Pharmacy phone lines are a terrible first use case for voice AI. Older callers, drug names, insurance mess, zero patience. Automating "store hours" is fine. Automating refill exceptions is how you get this outcome. > — [SalaevAl on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246453) > Cases like this raise a question. As an engineer, the errors that coding AIs make are an annoyance, and reassuring in terms of my job prospect. As a consumer, the errors that AIs make are more than an annoyance. I have yet to meet an AI phone assistant that can do anything more than an explicitly programmed phone tree, and several, including the one for the pharmacy I use, that do far less. They are undoubtedly much more expensive to create and test. Clearly there's a bubble going on, and unprincipled people chasing funding and promotions as usual, but why are companies like CVS paying more to get less? I think it is literally to waste our time. It's one more layer of defense to stop you from talking to a person. There are two big wins in health care. One is to increase the scope of health care that gets paid for. More and more expensive treatments, to bring the money in. The second big win is to stop people from getting treatment. Deny coverage, confuse them and wear them out with bureaucracy, and in this case stop them from talking to an expensively educated human pharmacist. That's what an AI does better than a phone tree, because it more effectively creates a sense of helplessness and valuelessness in the customer. Expanding the scope of care you're entitled to and then fighting against your ability to get it isn't a contradiction any more than it's a contradiction when a person breathes in and breathes out. It's two synergistic parts of a system whose goal ultimately has nothing to do with health care. > — [dkarl on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247622) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49244569) · 77 points · 99 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Utah's AI prescription pilot alarms its medical board](https://daily.dev/posts/utah-s-ai-prescription-pilot-alarms-its-medical-board-hcyx0r51j) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Burger King rolls out employee assistance AI that listens in](https://daily.dev/posts/burger-king-rolls-out-employee-assistance-ai-that-listens-in-rjxl3nng8) · The Register · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Kin Health raises $9M to build an AI notetaker for patients](https://daily.dev/posts/kin-health-raises-9m-to-build-an-ai-notetaker-for-patients-x84deczfw) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#devtools](https://daily.dev/tags/devtools), [#data-privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/data-privacy), [#healthcare](https://daily.dev/tags/healthcare) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-of-customer-complaints-zpdekb9oj) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-of-customer-complaints-zpdekb9oj","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-of-customer-complaints-zpdekb9oj"},"datePublished":"2026-08-10T16:46:04.552Z","dateModified":"2026-09-13T18:30:52.048Z","description":"Kinney Drugs is rolling back its AI phone assistant, Burt, after receiving hundreds of customer complaints about incoherent calls, incorrect dosage...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/0147f00f353b6fc34894cdc3d025f0d3?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/0147f00f353b6fc34894cdc3d025f0d3?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-of-customer-complaints-zpdekb9oj","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"devtools,data-privacy,healthcare","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-of-customer-complaints-zpdekb9oj#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"Why did Kinney Drugs stop using its AI phone assistant Burt for incoming patient calls?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Kinney Drugs scaled back Burt, its AI phone assistant, after hundreds of customers reported incoherent calls, wrong medication dosages, and missed prescription refill notifications. 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