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Dystopian: Largest Grocery Store Chain In Japan Uses AI To Monitor Staff Smiles, Speech Tones And Issues ‘Game’ Scores To Improve Quality Service – via thewinepress.substack.com
An employee said, “People are different, and they also express their affections differently. Using a machine to ‘standardize’ people’s attitude sounds cold and silly.”
AEON, Japan’s largest grocery store chain, recently became the world’s first company to use AI to track the smiles and emotional state of staff who interact with customers. It will be rolled out at all 240 Japanese locations.
According to a report by South China Morning Post (SCMP),the company debuted what they call “Mr. Smile,” developed by local tech firm InstaVR. Mr. Smile can ‘accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude,’ the paper says. It can analyze 450 different elements including facial expressions, voice volume and tone of greetings. It also has “game” elements that incentivize staff to increase their scores by beating-out their previous scores.
The AEON says they trialed the system in eight different stores with roughly 3,400 employees, and said that service attitudes increased by up to 1.6 times over a period of three months.
AEON said its goal was to “standardize staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum.” The company did not clarify if this feedback was from the employees or the results calculated by the artificial intelligence.
CX Today reported that the move ‘raises serious questions about the morality of pressuring workers to express themselves in a particular way.’
“By pressuring agents to act in a particular manner that is deemed agreeable by the company, they are losing their individuality and freedom to express themselves as they see fit,” the tech outlet said.
This new AI rollout has ignited a discussion as to whether or not this is actually increasing workplace harassment – something that has been a big problem in Japan for many years. In Japan, it’s known as “kasu-hara,” which is a form of habitual complaints and using derogatory language.
‘This year, nearly half of the 30,000 staff surveyed, who work in the service industry and other sectors, reported experiencing customer harassment to Japan’s biggest union, UA Zensen,’ the SCMP reported.
“When the service industry workers are forced to smile according to a ‘standard’, it looks to me like another form of customer harassment,” said one.
“Smiles should be a beautiful, heartfelt thing, and not be treated like a product,” another said.
A third employee added, “People are different, and they also express their affections differently. Using a machine to ‘standardize’ people’s attitude sounds cold and silly.”
In 2022, The WinePress reported that New Zealand implemented “Smile Security” in the city of Hastings, which will be monitoring and surveilling Kiwis’ speech and actions, and any such negative ones could trigger the police to assess the situation and visit the tagged offender.
Mastercard has also released “Smile To Pay,” a new biometric form of making payments.
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Tonight’s musical offering:
Dispatches from the Asylum 