/>iWith the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the industry, restaurants should have the following considerations on the front burner:
AI Bots Including Conversational Voice Kiosks. These enable natural language interactions with customers, more personalized targeting, upselling and other advantages. But it is important to consider not just the standard customer data privacy issues that arise, but also issues with the biometric information, such as voiceprints and facial recognition on which these technologies are based. For example, permission is typically needed to use any personal biometric information to train AI models.
Training AI Models On Your Customer Data. Many companies are sitting on a trove of customer data and realizing this data can be valuable to train AI models. However, it may be problematic to use customer data in a manner that exceeds or otherwise is not permitted by the privacy policy in effect at the time the data was collected as discussed in our recent post.
Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission recently published guidance warning companies who attempt to retroactively amend their terms of service or privacy policy to authorize the use of previously collected customer data to train an AI model could be an unfair and deceptive practice in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act. More on the FTC’s guidance can be found in our post, AI (and other) Companies: Quietly Changing Your Terms of Service Could Be Unfair or Deceptive.
To mitigate these and other AI-related legal risks, companies need to develop policies on employee use of AI and for the responsible development of AI tools and AI models.
