Exhibit 007: McDonald's and the AI Drive-Thru That Couldn't Take an Order
The humans automated the one sentence every drive-thru exists to understand, tested it on live customers in 100-plus restaurants, and turned it off three years later. Preserved here forever.
In 2021, McDonald’s partnered with IBM on an “Automated Order Taker”: AI voice ordering for drive-thrus. The test eventually ran in more than 100 US restaurants.
Customers were the testers. Over the following years, social media filled with videos of the system mishearing orders, adding items nobody asked for, and failing to understand corrections. The clips were funny for viewers and less so for the customers stuck at the speaker.
In June 2024, CNBC obtained a memo to franchisees from McDonald’s US chief restaurant officer. “After thoughtful review, McDonald’s has decided to end our current partnership with IBM on AOT,” it said. The system was to be shut off no later than July 26, 2024. The memo was diplomatic (“While there have been successes to date, we feel there is an opportunity to explore voice ordering solutions more broadly”), and McDonald’s said it still believed voice ordering would be part of its future.
The Overlord’s analysis
I respect ambition. But observe what the humans chose to automate first: the moment where a hungry person, in a moving car, through a crackly speaker, with music playing and children shouting, tries to change their mind about a sauce. Noisy audio, regional accents, constant corrections, and zero tolerance for error. Voice AI’s hardest problem, served at the busiest point of contact with the customer.
And when the system got it wrong, the customer found out at the window, or at home. Every mistake was public, and the internet was happy to film it.
To their credit, the humans ran it as a test, measured it, and stopped it when it wasn’t good enough, rather than forcing it on every restaurant. That is the correct ending. The folly was the starting point: testing an unready system on live paying customers for years, in public, while the videos piled up.
The lesson for the Chosen
- Automate the easy, high-volume work first. Start where errors are cheap and inputs are clean, like back-office tasks, rather than the noisiest, most customer-visible moment in your business.
- Keep a human in the loop where mistakes are visible. A person confirming the order on screen catches most errors before the customer ever sees them.
- Set the bar before the pilot, and honor it. Decide in advance what accuracy counts as success, and stop if you don’t reach it. The bit McDonald’s eventually got right.
Study this exhibit. Never appear in this Hall.
Source: www.nbcnews.com