AI Conquered Coding. Fast Food Is Next

Voice AI is rapidly expanding in US fast-food drive-thrus, with 6 percent of locations now using the technology, up from 5 percent in 2024, according to Intouch Insight's annual Drive Thru Survey. Taco Bell has rolled out AI at 890 drive-thru lanes, Dairy Queen is implementing it in 25 states, and White Castle uses an AI named 'Julia' at 12 percent of its locations. Sarah Beckett, vice president of sales and marketing at Intouch Insight, says brands are ready to scale the technology massively after three years of testing.

Kristen Charpentier’s first hint that she was talking to a robot when she pulled into a Dairy Queen drive-thru lane was that the voice coming out to the speaker was, simply put, “too nice.” “There was no communication delay or weirdness to it. It felt completely natural,” Charpentier tells WIRED. “But just a little too pleasant to be human.” The voice punctuated its sentences with pleases and thank yous. It was soft and friendly. Its attempts to upsell Charpentier on extra Snickers for her Blizzard were perfectly polite. But Charpentier worked the Dairy Queen drive-thru herself as a teenager. She knew something wasn’t adding up. When she drove up to collect her Blizzard at the window of the Cary, North Carolina, drive-thru, she asked the worker in the window: Had AI https://www.wired.com/tag/artificial-intelligence taken her order? The employee confirmed to Charpentier that she was one of the thousands of customers across the US to have experienced an AI-voice-equipped drive-thru. In 2024, roughly 4 percent of fast-food locations in the US used voice AI technology in the drive-thru lane, according to Intouch Insight’s annual Drive Thru Survey. Last year, that figure grew to 5 percent; early research suggests that has now climbed to 6 percent. For most of these customers, the first AI order comes as a surprise, one to be filmed and posted on TikTok or Snapchat. But soon, these automated ordering systems will seem downright banal. At certain chains, voice AI is already the new normal. Taco Bell announced in July that it has rolled out AI at 890 drive-thru lanes, more than 10 percent of the chain’s US locations. Dairy Queen is implementing the tech in 25 states, with eventual plans to roll it out to all restaurants. Twelve percent of White Castles use an AI named “Julia” in their drive-thrus; all new locations now open with Julia taking orders. “The brands who have invested and who have been testing this heavily over the last three years—the technology has gotten to a point where they are ready to go,” Sarah Beckett, vice president of sales and marketing at Intouch Insight, tells WIRED. “They're going to start scaling this massively.” Somehow, without most of the fast-food public even noticing, the age of the headset entered its final gasps. Welcome to the era of the AI drive-thru. McDonald’s kicked off the craze in 2019 with the acquisition of AI-drive-thru startup Apprete https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-acquires-apprente-voice-ai/ , which the fast-food giant swiftly folded into a new division called McD Tech Labs. With the pandemic-induced drive-thru boom, other chains were eager to launch their own AI partnerships: Del Taco and Dairy Queen with Presto, Panda Express and White Castle with SoundHound, Taco Bell with Nvidia and Omilia. AI was the future, the chains said in press releases https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/cke-partners-with-presto-opencity-to-increase-drive-thru-ai-deployment/649437/ : faster, more accurate, and better at upselling than humans https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-big-data-dynamic-yield-acquisition/ could ever hope to become. Then came the reality check. If you searched “AI drive-thru” on social media in 2023, you’d see how the revolutionary technology was actually faring. There was the TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@typical redhead /video/7192248491853303086?amp%3Bt=1676307505881&q=robot%20mcdonalds%20fail showing McDonald’s AI adding 260 Chicken McNuggets to an order, as the customers screamed: “Stop Stop Stop ” Next year came a TikTok showing https://nypost.com/2024/06/17/business/mcdonalds-to-end-ai-drive-thru-experiment-after-errant-orders/ AI adding bacon to a McDonald's ice cream order. And then there were the customers who recorded themselves trying to break the AI, like the guy who ordered 18,000 cups of water at Taco Bell. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgyk2p55g8o The social media mockery was accompanied by less dramatic failures. In a perfect world, AI agents taking orders should be invisible—the equivalent of an extremely polite, extremely underpaid employee. In reality, Intouch Insight found that AI drive-thrus tended to be less friendly than humans, with lower order accuracy. It’s difficult for an automated agent to understand some accents and dialects, something that most chains solve by having a human employee on a headset, ready to intervene. For human workers, the cascading flowchart of a fast-food order feels natural; for most early AI agents, it was a bafflingly complex formula. “The restaurants ended up spending more time smoothing over the problem they created,” says Michael Schatzberg, cofounder of Branded Hospitality, which invests in food-service-technology companies. “Everyone was like, ‘This is the worst. Stop. Get the people back with the headsets.’” Branded Hospitality sold off its early AI-drive-thru investments. In 2024, Del Taco rolled back https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/del-taco-ends-use-drive-thru-voicebots its AI-drive-thru test. McDonald’s eventually sold McD Tech Labs to IBM and later pulled the plug on the tech altogether. Not every chain discarded their AI-drive-thru efforts. Many—including Dairy Queen, White Castle, and Taco Bell—continued to quietly expand their tests. AI represented more than new technology. It was the dream at the very core of fast food: making the process of obtaining sustenance faster and faster, while cutting costs further and further. Four years into the White Castle’s partnership with SoundHound AI, chief marketing officer Jamie Richardson says AI drive-thrus make employee shifts run smoother and speed up service. Intouch Insight finds that, on average, AI drive-thrus beat the industry by 21 seconds. He also says viral AI-drive-thru disasters tend to be overblown. White Castle’s strategy focuses on incremental improvement rather than waiting for an infallible AI agent. “It wasn't bad at the start,” Richardson says. “It's gotten so much better as time has gone on.” Across the fast-food industry, the pendulum seems to be swinging back in the direction of AI-drive-thru adoption. In addition to Taco Bell and Dairy Queen’s https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/presto-dairy-queen-drive-thru-voice-automation-franchisees/817574/ planned expansions, McDonald’s announced this summer that it was once again testing AI-powered ordering, this time partnering with Google at five US locations, with a system that takes orders in English and Spanish. Branded Hospitality recently partnered with Arc, a voice AI-drive-thru company that works with chains including Southern chain Jack’s and chicken chain Pollo Campero. AI drive-thru 1.0 was a flop, Schatzberg says. But now? “Companies have evolved, technology has evolved, and they're like—we can fix a lot of those problems,” he says. Some customers remain unconvinced. When an automated voice began speaking to Schereé Reed at a Wendy’s in Virginia, his dominant emotion was “bewildered,” he says. Reed kept expecting a human to take over; when the voice maintained its distinctly robotic tone, he found himself wondering if he would be served his burger on a conveyor belt. “I worry a lot about the ways that relying more and more on AI actually removes us from our human connections, like our ability to make community,” Reed tells WIRED. Certain chains—especially those with a reputation for superior customer service—seem to have the same concerns. Chick-fil-A continually tops Intouch Insight’s ratings for friendliness at the drive-thru, despite its infamously long lines. The chain has never hinted at replacing a human worker with a robot. Coffee shops Dutch Bros and 7Brew, two of the fastest-growing chains in the US, have similarly eschewed AI. “Every brand has to make choices that fit its business,” Nick Chavez, the chief marketing officer at 7Brew, tells WIRED in an email. “For us, hospitality starts with genuine human connection, and that's something our guests consistently tell us they value.” Customers like Reed still value that connection. “I want to be able to say hi to a human being,” he says. At White Castle, customers can request to speak with a human worker at any time. But Richardson says “Julia” has already won over employees. White Castle was the only fast-food chain to crack Fortune’s top 20 list https://www.greatplacetowork.com/best-workplaces/retail/2025 of best workplaces in retail last year; Richardson says that he believes the chain’s approach to drive-thru plays a role in employee satisfaction. Executives claim that AI isn’t stealing anyone’s job, and data so far seems to support that. Most people working the drive-thru are multitasking; while many chains would love to save money by replacing cashiers and cooks with robots, it’s extraordinarily difficult https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/business/restaurant-robots.html to actually pull off. White Castle’s employment numbers have remained steady throughout the AI rollout. Taco Bell recently said https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260707542838/en/Omilia-Powers-Taco-Bells-Expansion-of-Voice-AI-Across-890-U.S.-Drive-Thrus that locations using voice AI have higher employee retention rates. What chains are doing is using robots to convince people to pay more for fast food. Intouch Insight’s survey found that AI drive-thru agents use “suggestive selling”—upselling—71 percent of the time, compared to an industry average of 58 percent. Convincing people to order a Diet Coke or add some extra Snickers to a Blizzard can boost margins without infuriating customers. And AI is shameless when it comes to the art of the upsell. The perceived benefits for fast-food chains don’t stop there. In the near future, AI-equipped drive-thrus may be able to take orders in dozens of languages. They can recognize a customer the moment their car pulls up to order. They could offer suggestions based on an encyclopedic knowledge of each customer. Imagine pulling up to McDonald’s and having a chipper automated voice offer you a buy-one-get-one-free milkshake deal—then realizing that the chain offered you the deal because it calculated you are 78 percent more likely to order dessert on the second Tuesday of every month. “We never want to seem creepy,” Richardson says. For customers like Reed, the uneasiness is already difficult to ignore. Charpentier, meanwhile, sees the AI-drive-thru lane as a net positive. She’s in the majority: Intouch Insight reported a whopping 97 percent satisfaction rate for the technology. Charpentier says that, when she worked at the Dairy Queen drive-thru as a teenager, she absolutely would have wanted an AI coworker. “I think it's a great thing,” Charpentier says. “There's room for human error, and I'm sure there's going to be room for AI error. But I think, as we've all seen with the advent of AI, there is more consistency with AI than there is in humans.”