McDonald’s stops taking drive-thru orders using artificial intelligence

McDonald’s restaurants are abandoning their drive-thru order taking tests using artificial intelligence, due to numerous errors.

Since 2022, in around a hundred McDonald’s stores, when arriving by car at the drive-thru, the customer is not greeted by an employee at the cash register, therefore a human being, but by a computer program which takes the order.

The operation is the same as a classic order, the program asks the customer about their choice, who responds as if they were talking to a human employee. It’s even possible to change your mind or even make special requests, like removing ketchup from a hamburger.

The problem is that there are bugs. Dozens of failures were published on social networks. Someone ordered two boxes of ten nuggets, they gave him 2010. Another asked for vanilla ice cream, but the machine insisted on selling him butter. Sometimes customers struggled so much with the system that an employee had to come to the rescue.

This is further proof that artificial intelligence is not as magical as some claim. This system had been implemented only in the United States, but it was intended to be deployed throughout the world. Ultimately, this will not be the case, since the pilot is arrested.

McDonald’s is not the only one to experience this kind of setbacks. Other American fast-food brands, such as Checkers and Carl’s Junior, were also targeted a few months ago. Their order-taking software claimed to rely on high-performance artificial intelligence. Except that after investigation, it turned out that more than 70% of the work was done by small hands based in the Philippines.

In fact, there was no real artificial intelligence, but a lot of outsourced work. Again, there is nothing magical and the fear of great replacement by AI may have been greatly exaggerated.