Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
Summary
Kinney Drugs is scaling back its AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints about incoherent calls, wrong dosages, and privacy concerns, reverting to a touch-tone system while keeping the AI for opt-in outbound communications.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 08/10/26, 05:35 PM
Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
Source: https://www.wcax.com/2026/08/07/kinney-drugs-pulls-back-ai-phone-assistant-after-hundreds-customer-complaints/ BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) - Kinney Drugs is scaling back its AI assistant after customers reported incoherent calls, wrong dosages, and missed prescription notifications.
Kinney Drugs first introduced Burt, an AI assistant named after the pharmacy chain’s founder, back in May. The bot’s role was to communicate with patients about prescriptions and refills. But customers quickly reported a number of issues with the tech, as first reported by VTDigger.
“But one thing I want to point out is getting privacy and security right does not mean we got the experience right. We did not, and we own that,” Kinney Drugs President John Marraffa said.
Marraffa says Kinney will return to its old model for incoming patient calls — the classic touch-tone phone system.
Customers also raised concerns about data privacy — worried their personal health information could be exposed through an AI platform. Marraffa says Burt is fully HIPAA compliant and that the AI is not open-source and does not generate or manipulate data.
Kinney will keep Burt for outbound communications like prescription refill texts, but patients must opt in to receive them.
Copyright 2026 WCAX. All rights reserved.
Similar Articles
What is up with companies lying about AI customer service?
The author describes an experience where AI customer service representatives at a banking company repeatedly denied being bots while providing computational answers, highlighting concerns about deceptive AI use in customer interactions.
Is everybody else getting tired of AI tools that only tell you what went wrong after the customer hangs up or is it just me?
The article critiques AI tools in customer service that only analyze calls after they happen, proposing real-time guidance while raising concerns about dystopian use, agent adoption, and scalability for growing companies.
AI just made it impossible to fake reading customer calls
AI synthesis tools have made it impossible for product managers to fake having read customer calls, exposing those who were not engaging with customer feedback and changing hiring practices.
New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human
New Orleans is implementing AI to answer 911 calls, using Carbyne's AI Emergency Call Triage to reduce the volume of calls handled by human dispatchers. The system triages callers and routes them to humans as needed, though risks like bias and reliability remain.
Best AI phone call agent? I tested 8, and they're really two different kinds of product
The author tested eight AI phone call agents, categorizing them into build-it-yourself platforms and direct-call services, and evaluated their performance in booking appointments with specific criteria.