In the nearly three years since McDonald's announced it was partnering with IBM to develop an ai-powered self-service order taker, videos have emerged on social media showing confused and frustrated customers trying to correct comically inaccurate meals.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” two friends shouted in humorous anguish in a TikTok video while a self-service ai misinterprets your order, adding 240, 250, and then 260 Chicken McNuggets.
In other videos, the ai orders a customer nine iced teas instead of one, doesn't explain why one customer couldn't order Mountain Dew and thought another wanted to add bacon to his ice cream.
So when McDonald's announced in technology/mcdonalds-ending-its-drive-thru-ai-test” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>an internal email from June 13obtained by the trade publication Restaurant Business, which would end its partnership with IBM and close its ai tests at more than 100 drive-thrus in the US, customers who had interacted with the service probably weren't surprised.
The decision to abandon the IBM deal comes as many other companies, including its competitors, are investing in ai. But it exemplifies some of the challenges companies face as they race to unlock the potential of this revolutionary technology.
Other fast food companies have had success with ai ordering. Last year, Wendy's formed a ai-restaurant-innovation” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>partnership with Google Cloud to build your shortcut system with ai. tech/carls-jr-ai-drive-thru-order-experience” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Carl's Jr. and ai-taco-johns” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Taco John's have hired Presto, a voice ai company for restaurants. Panda Express has approximately 30 automated order takers at its windows through a partnership with voice artificial intelligence company SoundHound ai.
Another SoundHound partner, White Castle, has ai assistants taking orders at 15 drive-thrus and plans to deploy 100 more, spokespeople for the two companies said. The technology completes nearly 90 percent of orders without human involvement, works efficiently with staff and reduces customer wait times during peak hours, said Jamie Richardson, vice president of White Castle.
“It's great for customers; It’s equally fantastic for the team members,” he told The New York Times. “I can't speculate why others wouldn't invest in similar technology, but we're very happy with ours.”
Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and co-founder of SoundHound, believes McDonald's exit is simply an example of a failed partnership.
“It was very clear that they are abandoning IBM, they are not abandoning voice ai,” he said. “They are very quickly chasing other suppliers.”
McDonald's confirmed its intention to eventually return to this technology, writing in the internal email that “a voice ordering solution” would be in the chain's future.
In a statement, IBM said it hopes to continue working with McDonald's, adding that it is “in discussions and pilots” with several restaurants that are interested in developing its automated ordering technology. McDonald's confirmed to the Times the termination of its ai drive-thru services, but neither company responded to more specific questions.
Several researchers and industry experts see McDonald's departure as an example of how new technology has yet to meet expectations. They doubted the company would quickly return to testing ai ordering in its drive-thrus.
“ai systems often have a very high upfront cost,” said Neil Thompson, director of FutureTech, a research project at MIT's Computer Science and artificial intelligence Laboratory. (FutureTech has worked with IBM, but Thompson said he had no inside knowledge of the McDonald's deal.)
Currently, voice ai is so inaccurate that it requires some level of human oversight, reducing cost savings, Thompson said. And McDonald's has a powerful alternative offering with higher profit margins: its mobile app.
“The app saves 100 percent of the work that goes into taking that order in a way that these ai systems, at least currently, can't do it for them,” Thompson said. “That makes it much more economically attractive for them to use the app than to use ai.”
McDonald's hasn't abandoned all of its ai investments. In December 2023, the company announced which was working with Google Cloud. A spokesperson for the tech giant said it would apply to “enterprise use cases” but declined to be more specific.
Alex Imas, a professor of economics and behavioral sciences at the University of Chicago, predicted that McDonald's will watch from the sidelines as its competitors explore technology.
McDonald's business model is not based on saving on the cost of a few drive-thru workers, Imas said. “I think they'll want to wait and make sure this is ready for commercial use.”
He hopes McDonald's will use ai in other ways, perhaps following the lead of Target, which recently announced it was using the technology to help its employees.
Gee Lefevre, Presto's interim CEO, acknowledged that the technology is very new: “less than 0.5 percent of all U.S. drive-thrus” are testing the use of ai to take voice orders, he said.
But he also noted that many of the early attempts have been successful.
Wendy's, in an email to The Times, said its ai-powered drive-thru services work without human help on 86 percent of orders. And Presto has had a rate of about 90 percent with most of its customers, Lefevre said.
He believes McDonald's got into trouble because it used the wrong type of ai.
“The IBM model was still based on natural language understanding,” Lefevre said, explaining that the model works like a tree. When the ai listens to the customer's request, it has a limited number of branches to follow that dictate its responses and actions.
This works very well when everything is going well, Lefevre said. But in a drive-thru, where undecided customers frequently change their orders, he said, chains would be better off using the kind of big language model that powers chatbots like ChatGPT.
As companies continue to test their vehicle ai technologies, expect to see more videos of people getting bacon ice cream, condiments instead of food or enough nuggets to feed a sports team.
But ask Mr. Mohajer where voice ai is going and he'll tell you why SoundHound has partnered with automotive companies like Kia and Jeep.
Imagine this.
You're driving home from work when suddenly the car asks, “Are you hungry?”
After a few minutes of chatting with your vehicle, you decide on a burger, fries, and a shake. The car finds the nearest grease scoop, places your order, and gives you directions. In three minutes, you arrive and there's dinner, sitting patiently in a pickup lane, waiting for you to arrive.
