Your Next McDonald's Drive-Thru Experience Could Be Changing

McDonald’s is a pretty popular topic here at AllEars because when we’re not eating Disney World and Disneyland food (and, occasionally, Dollywood food), we’re probably eating McDonald’s.

McDonald’s has been testing out a lot of new ideas recently, including the now-defunct CosMc’s. The company also has other ideas it’s starting to put into action. The most recent involves using AI in the drive-thru.

According to ABC News, McDonald’s is testing out a new AI drive-thru technology at five U.S. locations that could change the entire drive-thru experience. So instead of placing an order with a human, ArchiQ, McDonald’s new Google-powered AI ordering system, would take your order.

Here’s how it works: when a car pulls up to the drive-thru area, an AI system greets customers and takes orders. It’s also capable of pausing to take changes and requests to orders before it puts the final order on display with its total cost. Then the screen would prompt the customer to “pull ahead” to pick up said order.

ArchIQ can take orders in English and Spanish and can even respond to returning customers who ask, “Can I get my usual?” According to one McDonald’s franchise owner, the AI got about 90% of orders “without human escalations.” The idea is that this will free up McDonald’s workers to do something else. In theory, that’s a valid point. If you’ve pulled up to a McDonald’s recently when it’s very busy, you’ll have employees handling multiple tasks, which can slow down orders, as well as get orders wrong.

On the other hand, though, AI isn’t 100% accurate either, and this could result in more wrong orders that will still take up employees’ valuable time. AI is a controversial topic, and the social media response to McDonald’s wanting to use it like this has been largely negative.

McDonald’s hasn’t shared plans to roll AI drive-thru technology any further than the locations it’s currently testing the system at, so we’ll have to see what happens.

We’ll keep an eye out for more food news, so check back with AllEars again soon for more.