AIFoPa-2026-0022 — It Was Named After the Founder

In May 2026 Kinney Drugs placed an artificial intelligence assistant on its patient telephone line. The chain runs some ninety-six stores across New York and Vermont. The assistant was given responsibility for prescription refills and patient communication.

It was also given a name. The assistant is called Burt, after Burt Orrin Kinney, who founded the chain in Gouverneur, New York in 1903. He was not consulted and is not available for comment.

The system was supplied by Synerio, a technology company in Texas. Customers were not told in advance that it was coming. Several learned of it by telephoning for a refill and being answered by it.

Nearly a dozen customers across both states told VTDigger what Burt did with the telephone line. The investigation was published on 29 July.

It placed calls in which it recited the name of a drug indistinctly and then asked for the refill to be approved. It requested refills that were not due. It ordered incorrect dosages. It could not locate accounts of many years’ standing. It did not notify people when their prescriptions were ready for collection.

The interval between a physician ordering a medication and the pharmacy processing it grew longer.

One customer approved a request she could not make out. She assumed, reasonably, that a pharmacy telephoning her about a prescription knows which prescription it is telephoning about. She found herself in possession of four bottles of something she takes twice a week.

By the time the chain acted, WCAX and KWQC were placing the number of complaints in the hundreds.

There was no keypad. Burt replaced a prompt-based touch-tone menu, which the customers who spoke to VTDigger described, without qualification, as having worked.

Burt offered speech and nothing else. The patient had to conduct the transaction by speaking to it. One customer, a physician by training, put the position as being to talk to Burt or not receive the drugs.

For patients in rural Vermont without transport, the alternative to speaking to Burt was not speaking to anybody. Those who could reach a counter did. That is the second finding in this file and appears below.

The Bureau now draws attention to a document, because the Bureau is in the business of documents. Kinney Drugs’ published terms run to eleven. They state that “Burt may not be accurate, complete or up-to-date and may be misleading or contain errors and omissions.”

This is the ordinary language of a software disclaimer. Attached to a weather widget it would be unremarkable. It was attached to the mechanism by which patients were asked to confirm which medicine they required.

Both facts are set down beside one another. No reconciliation is offered, there being none.

Enrolment was not sought. Under the same terms, any customer who had at any point given Kinney Drugs a telephone number had thereby consented to be telephoned by Burt. An opt-out was available afterwards to those who worked out that there was something to opt out of.

On Friday 7 August 2026 the chain’s president, John Marraffa, told WCAX that the tool was being pulled back. “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.”

Incoming patient calls have returned to the touch-tone system. Burt survives in reduced form, sending prescription refill texts. For those the patient must now opt in.

A company representative had earlier told VTDigger that Kinney Drugs was “aware that some patients have experienced frustration with Burt, especially during rollout”. The representative said it was reviewing each concern and attempting to reach each patient. By which channel the representative did not say.

The stated purpose of the deployment was to lift repetitive work off the pharmacists. A company director is on record that it was succeeding. “It’s definitely doing the trick and handling those phone calls in such a nice manner that it’s reducing the calls to our pharmacy.”

That statement and the customers’ accounts are not in conflict. Calls to the pharmacy did fall.

Customers unable to resolve a refill by telephone went to the counter instead. They asked the pharmacists. Pharmacists are the scarcer resource, Vermont’s pharmacy workforce being in a documented shortage. They are not counted in the call figures.

The efficiency was genuine and was measured accurately. It was simply not located where the instrument was pointed. This was not, in the end, a failure of the model. It was a failure to ask what the number was for.