Business owners insist that robots will take over work that is dirty, dangerous, or just dull, enabling humans to focus on other tasks. The international chain CaliBurger, for example, will soon install Flippy, a robot that can flip 150 burgers an hour. John Miller, the CEO of Cali Group, which owns the chain, says employees don’t like manning the hot, greasy grill. Once the robots are sweating in the kitchen, human employees will be free to interact with customers in more-targeted ways, bringing them extra napkins and asking them how they’re enjoying their burgers. Blaine Hurst, the CEO and president of Panera, told me that his no-longer-needed cashiers have been tasked with keeping tabs on the customer experience. Panera customers typically retrieve their food from the counter themselves. But at restaurants where they place their orders at kiosks, employees now bring food from the kitchen to their tables. “That labor has been redeployed back into the café to provide a differentiated guest experience,” Hurst said.

How many employees, though, do you need milling about in the café? The early success of the kiosks suggests that, at least when ordering fast food, patrons prize speed over high-touch customer service. Will companies like CaliBurger and Panera see sufficient value in employing human greeters and soup-and-sandwich deliverers to keep those positions around long-term?

Steve Scott

The experience of Eatsa may be instructive. The start-up restaurant, based in San Francisco, allows customers to order its quinoa bowls and salads on their smartphone or an in-store tablet and then pick up their order from an eerie white wall of cubbies—an Automat for the app age. Initially, two greeters were stationed alongside the cubbies to welcome and direct customers. But over time, customers relied less frequently on the greeters, co-founder and CEO Tim Young told me, and the company now employs a single greeter in its restaurants.

The type of person who orders a grain bowl on an iPhone is perhaps content to forgo a welcoming human face. There may not be enough such people to sustain a business, however, at least not yet. Eatsa announced in October that it was closing its locations in New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Berkeley. Young told me that the problem was the food, not the technology, and that other restaurant chains are interested in deploying Eatsa’s model. The taco salad I ordered was pretty good, though, and, at $8, cheaper than the fare at many other salad chains. I wondered whether the problem wasn’t that Eatsa had crossed the fine line separating efficiency from something out of Blade Runner.

Less dystopian was the scene at Zume Pizza, in Mountain View, California, where I watched an assembly line of robots spread sauce on dough and lift pies into the oven. Thanks to its early investment in automation, Zume spends only 10 percent of its budget on labor, compared with 25 percent at a typical restaurant operation. The humans it does employ are given above-average wages and perks: Pay starts at $15 an hour and comes with full benefits; Zume also offers tuition reimbursement and tutoring in coding and data science. I talked with a worker named Freedom Carlson, who doesn’t have a college degree. She started in the kitchen, where she toiled alongside the robots. She has since been promoted to culinary-program administrator, and is learning to navigate the software that calculates nutritional facts for Zume pizzas.

Steve Scott

This has typically been the story of automation: Technology obviates old jobs, but it also creates new ones—the job title radiology technician, for example, has been included in census data only since 1990. Transitioning to a new type of work is never easy, however, and it might be particularly difficult for many in the service sector. New jobs that arise after a technological upheaval tend to require skills that laid-off workers don’t have, and not all employers will be nearly as progressive as Zume. A college education helps insulate workers from automation, enabling them to develop the kind of expertise, judgment, and problem-solving abilities that robots can’t match. Yet nearly 80 percent of workers in food preparation and service-related occupations have a high-school diploma or less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.