Fast-Food Chains Revive AI Drive-Thru After Early Failures, Betting on Better Technology

For Kristen Charpentier, the giveaway was courtesy itself. When she pulled up to a Dairy Queen drive-thru window in North Carolina, the voice greeting her orders was unnervingly polite—no awkward pauses, no stumbles, just an almost supernaturally pleasant stream of pleases and thank yous. Having worked a drive-thru as a teenager, she immediately recognized something was off. She was right: an AI system had taken her order, one of thousands of Americans now experiencing this shift without warning.

The AI Drive-Thru Boom—and Bust#

McDonald's sparked the fast-food AI trend in 2019 when it acquired Apprente, a voice-AI startup that became McD Tech Labs. The pandemic accelerated interest, and chains rushed to partner with AI vendors: Taco Bell and Panda Express with companies like Nvidia and SoundHound, Dairy Queen and Del Taco with Presto. Industry leaders promised faster service, higher order accuracy, and superior salesmanship compared to human workers.

What arrived instead were comedy sketches. Social media filled with clips of AI systems gone haywire—McDonald's adding 260 Chicken McNuggets to a single order, bacon mysteriously landing on an ice cream purchase, a customer gaming the system into accepting 18,000 cups of water at Taco Bell. Beyond the viral failures lay a grimmer reality: Intouch Insight research showed AI agents struggled with accents and dialects, delivered lower order accuracy than humans, and came across as less friendly. Restaurants found themselves deploying human headset workers as backup—essentially creating the problem they'd tried to solve.

The reckoning was swift. McDonald's shut down McD Tech Labs and sold it to IBM. Del Taco rolled back its AI pilot entirely. Investors burned bridges with the technology; Michael Schatzberg, cofounder of Branded Hospitality, recalls that the early consensus was: "This is the worst. Stop. Get the people back with the headsets."

The Quiet Comeback#

But not every chain abandoned ship. Dairy Queen, White Castle, and Taco Bell pressed onward with their tests, iterating behind the scenes while the public moved on. The economics were too tempting: faster service (on average, 21 seconds faster than human ordering), lower staffing pressure, and ruthless upselling. Intouch Insight found that AI agents deploy suggestive selling 71 percent of the time versus a 58 percent industry baseline—converting hesitant customers into bigger orders without friction.