It’s 2025, and at fast food restaurants, artificial intelligence is almost as good as human employees at, messing up your order.
There’s a new report out on A.I. at fast food drive-thrus, and it found that A.I.-powered interactions provide: “Faster service, improved efficiency, and customer satisfaction.”
It looked at a series of test cases involving three things: A.I. voice-ordering, mobile ordering for pickup, and in-store kiosk ordering.
The results weren’t perfect. 22% of the time the A.I. voice-ordering system glitched, and needed an employee to step in and help.
There were also “order inaccuracies” with the A.I. And 65% of those involved A.I.’s inability to deal with a customization request. (They didn’t say how many times an employee stepped in, and STILL messed up the order.)
Mobile ordering cut time spent in the drive-thru by 1 minute and 54 seconds, and mobile ordering reduced in-store wait times by 3 minutes and 31 seconds.
When it comes to ordering at a kiosk, customer satisfaction with the order experience scored higher compared to traditional methods, probably because it’s easier to place a custom order.
But kiosk-ordering lags on “friendliness.” People complain that there’s no connection with the employees or the restaurant, with no one greeting them, acknowledging them, or thanking them.
(On a related note, there’s a restaurant in California using robots to assemble burgers, and they boast that the robot can do it in 27 seconds, which, looks pretty slow.)
(That said, the burgers DO look more consistent than the typical burger you’d get at McDonald’s, which a human probably spent THREE SECONDS assembling.)
