Taco Bell Expanding Its AI Drive-Thrus

If you prefer to place your fast food order with a human instead of communicating with quasi-sentient software, you might soon be considered out of touch. Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, announced this week that it hopes to implement Voice AI at hundreds more drive-thru lanes by the end of 2024 to “modernize its drive-thrus and elevate the experience for consumers and restaurant team members alike.” 

This voice-recognition technology is already in place at more than 100 of Taco Bell’s U.S. locations, but this expansion will test the viability of AI-assisted ordering on a global scale. Indeed, Yum! Brands, which also owns KFC, is currently testing the same tech at five KFC locations in Australia, where, the press release notes, it’s being “positively received by consumers and restaurant team members.”

For those who haven’t experienced Voice AI ordering, it works exactly like a traditional ordering process, with the potential benefit of more immediacy since no human employee is multitasking to take your order on the other end. The idea is that more orders can be taken more quickly because the employee who would have been tasked with order entry can now help assemble the orders and hand them off to customers. 

As more fast food chains nationwide have adopted this technology, there have been snags in that ostensibly smooth process. In its 2023 update on how AI implementation was progressing, Wendy’s noted that additional innovation was needed to contend with customers speaking casually or changing their minds about what to order — situations that are easy for humans to handle but more difficult for AI to parse.

In fact, as CBS News points out, McDonald’s, the world’s biggest fast food chain, ended its Automated Take Order pilot program in June. The partnership with IBM was initially launched to determine what role AI will have in ordering at McDonald’s going forward, but at the moment, it’s not exactly beloved among customers, many of whom have pointed out (via Reddit and TikTok especially) plenty of flaws in such systems even when placing a simple order. McDonald’s said it will continue to evaluate this tech into the future, but it’s unclear what form it will take or whether IBM will be involved in future testing. Del Taco ended its use of voice bots in February, even after noting in 2023 that the tech was “exceeding expectations.” 

For its part, Yum! Brands is confident that Voice AI will improve the Taco Bell experience. “With over two years of fine-tuning and testing the drive-thru Voice AI technology, we’re confident in its effectiveness in optimizing operations and enhancing customer satisfaction,” Lawrence Kim, the chief innovation officer at Taco Bell, shared in the press release. 

One of the most appealing things about Taco Bell is that anyone can customize their order in dozens of different ways. As long as the Voice AI drive-thru can handle a command like “Gimme a Crunchwrap Supreme with potatoes instead of rice and beans instead of beef plus creamy jalapeno sauce and extra pico de gallo” mumbled into the speaker at 3 a.m., then it might just prove its worth.