Starbucks made a national bet on an AI tool; 9 months later, it pulled the plug

133 points by _fastcompany a day ago on reddit | 5 comments

daking240 | 23 hours ago

Starbucks NFTs lasted longer than

spinningcolours | 22 hours ago

But wait, there's more!

"Niccol and COO Mike Grams have both indicated publicly that a new AI-driven daily replenishment model is coming. Niccol explained in January that the company is on track to implement it across stores by the end of this year."

WaylonC_TR | 5 hours ago

Great read. I'm the reporter who broke the story originally for Reuters. My DMs are always open. https://www.reuters.com/business/starbucks-scraps-ai-inventory-tool-across-north-america-2026-05-21/

wake4coffee | 4 hours ago

The crazy part IMO is the lack of double checking. Whenever a new tool is deployed you always double check the work before it is accepted. This is basic software QA.

danielbearh | 2 hours ago

I think this is a lot less damning of AI technology and more a bungle on the part of implementation. The only thing that made this disastorous was not allowing the flexibility to fall-back on previous methods while the system was fine-tuned.