Top Highlights

• Global fast food giant McDonald’s is ending a two-year test of using artificial intelligence to take customer orders in its drive-thrus. While the specific technology, provided by IBM, is being phased out next month, according to a report by Restaurant Business, the company still sees a place for AI in its order-taking process.
• McDonald’s began testing the drive-thru chatbot in October 2021, to determine if AI-powered automation could speed up customer service.
• The experiment did not go off without a hitch, as customers complained the chatbot routinely got orders wrong, asking if one customer would like bacon on their ice cream.
• Many fast food companies are looking to leverage artificial intelligence. In September, Wendy’s partnered with Gemini AI developer Google to bring its large language model (LLM) chatbots to its drive-thru lines—saying they wanted to “set our employees up to be in a position to succeed and make their lives a little bit easier in the restaurant.”
• In August, researchers at IBM said roughly 1.4 billion around 40% of workers will need new job training because of the integration of artificial intelligence into the workforce.

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