Coming (back) to a McDonald’s near you: AI-powered drive-thru lanes.
That’s right. Those feeling déjà vu aren’t mistaken: this is McDonald’s second foray into using AI at its burger delivery pit stops, after the first attempt — a collaboration with IBM — fell apart like a soggy Big Mac.
What, if anything, is different from the last rollout? The fast food chain is touting a new AI system called ArchIQ, which it’s testing in partnership with Google, according to Restaurant Business. “Archy,” as it’s nicknamed, is being deployed in five locations to start with, as part of McDonald’s horribly-branded “> NEXT” business strategy, aimed at giving the eatery’s tech stack a refresh.
One major McDonald’s franchisee, which runs an X account called “McFranchisee,” claimed in a post that Archy is already seeing action, and has processed over one million orders, with about 90 percent of the orders requiring no human intervention.
“Archy will not only assist drive-thru orders but act as a master brain to help managers run a better restaurant,” the franchise owner enthused, adding in another post that the AI system “will tell you if your freezer is down, have a choke point in the kitchen or something else that needs your attention.”
These claims weren’t received warmly. Plenty of customers piled into the replies to rage against the return of AI drive thrus, fearing that it’ll put employees out of work and that, just as importantly, the AI may kind of blow and make for a frustrating ordering experience.
“This sucks ass the ai drive thru at every restaurant I’ve been to suck,” was the critique leveled by one eloquent skeptic.
As the backlash mounted against the shameless AI refill, the franchise owner argued the “goal of AI is making their jobs easier” by freeing employees to focus on other parts of their job instead of “struggling to hear orders in noisy drive thrus,” echoing a common AI industry promise. “My employees have actually been asking for this,” the franchisee added, perhaps finally beggaring belief.
In any case, expectations will be low. The last AI effort went viral for all the wrong reasons, with customers documenting comical incidents where the AI slapped on over $250 worth of chicken nuggets. Faced with overwhelming mockery, McDonalds cancelled the experiment, which had been rolled out at over 100 restaurants.
It’s certainly not the only fast food chain shoving AI into its back of house operations. Wendy’s and Taco Bell have also experimented with AI drive thrus, with similarly botched results. Burger King went the extra dystopian step of forcing employees to wear AI-powered headsetsto monitor their friendliness and feed them marching orders from an OpenAI-powered chatbot. And an AI drive-thru system used at the fast-food chains Checkers and Carl’s Jr was later exposed as being mostly operated by overseas workers.
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