Kristen Charpentier’s first hint that she was talking to a robot when she pulled into a Dairy Queen drive-thru lane was that the voice coming out of the speaker was, simply put, “too nice.”
“There was no communication delay or weirdness to it. It felt completely natural,” Charpentier tells WIRED. “But just a little too pleasant to be human.”
The voice punctuated its sentences with pleases and thank yous. It was soft and friendly. Its attempts to upsell Charpentier on extra Snickers for her Blizzard were perfectly polite.
But Charpentier worked the Dairy Queen drive-thru herself as a teenager. She knew something wasn’t adding up. When she drove up to collect her Blizzard at the window of the Cary, North Carolina, drive-thru, she asked the worker in the window: Had AI taken her order?
The employee confirmed to Charpentier that she was one of the thousands of customers across the US to have experienced an AI-voice-equipped drive-thru. In 2024, roughly 4 percent of fast-food locations in the US used voice AI technology in the drive-thru lane, according to Intouch Insight’s annual Drive Thru Survey. Last year, that figure grew to 5 percent; early research suggests that has now climbed to 6 percent.
For most of these customers, the first AI order comes as a surprise, one to be filmed and posted on TikTok or Snapchat. But soon, these automated ordering systems will seem downright banal. At certain chains, voice AI is already the new normal. Taco Bell announced in July that it has rolled out AI at 890 drive-thru lanes, more than 10 percent of the chain’s US locations. Dairy Queen is implementing the tech in 25 states, with eventual plans to roll it out to all restaurants. Twelve percent of White Castles use an AI named “Julia” in their drive-thrus; all new locations now open with Julia taking orders.
“The brands who have invested and who have been testing this heavily over the last three years—the technology has gotten to a point where they are ready to go,” Sarah Beckett, vice president of sales and marketing at Intouch Insight, tells WIRED. “They’re going to start scaling this massively.”
Somehow, without most of the fast-food public even noticing, the age of the headset entered its final gasps. Welcome to the era of the AI drive-thru.
McDonald’s kicked off the craze in 2019 with the acquisition of AI-drive-thru startup Apprete, which the fast-food giant swiftly folded into a new division called McD Tech Labs. With the pandemic-induced drive-thru boom, other chains were eager to launch their own AI partnerships: Del Taco and Dairy Queen with Presto, Panda Express and White Castle with SoundHound, Taco Bell with Nvidia and Omilia. AI was the future, the chains said in press releases: faster, more accurate, and better at upselling than humans could ever hope to become.
Then came the reality check.
If you searched “AI drive-thru” on social media in 2023, you’d see how the revolutionary technology was actually faring. There was the TikTok showing McDonald’s AI adding 260 Chicken McNuggets to an order, as the customers screamed: “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Next year came a TikTok showing AI adding bacon to a McDonald’s ice cream order. And then there were the customers who recorded themselves trying to break the AI, like the guy who ordered 18,000 cups of water at Taco Bell.
The social media mockery was accompanied by less dramatic failures. In a perfect world, AI agents taking orders should be invisible—the equivalent of an extremely polite, extremely underpaid employee. In reality, Intouch Insight found that AI drive-thrus tended to be less friendly than humans, with lower order accuracy. It’s difficult for an automated agent to understand some accents and dialects, something that most chains solve by having a human employee on a headset, ready to intervene. For human workers, the cascading flowchart of a fast-food order feels natural; for most early AI agents, it was a bafflingly complex formula.
