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

In May 2026 Kinney Drugs, a pharmacy chain of some ninety-six stores across New York and Vermont, placed an artificial intelligence assistant on its patient telephone line and gave it responsibility for prescription refills and patient communication. It also gave it a name. The assistant is called Burt, after Burt Orrin Kinney, who founded the chain in Gouverneur, New York in 1903, and who 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.

What Burt did with the telephone line is the substance of this record. Customers told VTDigger — nearly a dozen of them, across both states, in an investigation published on 29 July — that the system placed calls in which it recited the name of a drug indistinctly and then asked for the refill to be approved; that it requested refills that were not due; that it ordered incorrect dosages; that it could not locate accounts of many years' standing; that it did not notify people when their prescriptions were ready for collection; and that the interval between a physician ordering a medication and the pharmacy processing it grew longer. One customer described approving a request she could not make out, on the entirely reasonable assumption that a pharmacy telephoning her about a prescription knows which prescription it is telephoning about, and finding 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. The arrangement Burt replaced was 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, and required the patient 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, which is the second finding in this file and appears further below.

The Bureau now draws attention to a document, because the Bureau is in the business of documents. Kinney Drugs' published terms — of which there are eleven, a fact the Bureau records without comment and with some fellow feeling — 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, and the Bureau would not have opened a file. It was attached to the mechanism by which patients were asked to confirm which medicine they required. The Bureau sets both facts down beside one another and offers no reconciliation between them, having none. It notes additionally that 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, with an opt-out 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, in a sentence the Bureau considers the best of its kind filed this year and reproduces in full: “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, and 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,” and that 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, and 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.” The Bureau wishes to be clear that this 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, and asked the pharmacists, who are the scarcer resource — Vermont's pharmacy workforce being in a documented shortage — and who 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. The Bureau has classified a great many failures of artificial intelligence in the past year and observes that this one was not, in the end, a failure of the model at all; it was a failure to ask what the number was for.