Taco Bell is reportedly reconsidering its use of artificial intelligence to take care of its drive-thrus — and it looks like a couple of viral clips of orders gone wrong is the reason.
The restaurant chain’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Dane Matthews, spoke about the technology in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me,” he said.
Matthews said that the restaurant was “learning a lot” about AI and will think carefully about how to use it going forward, including not at drive-thrus.
"We'll help coach teams on when to use voice AI and when it's better to monitor or step in," he said.
The restaurant’s comments about AI come amidst a couple of viral clips involving its AI ordering system taking over the internet. In one of them, a person orders 18,000 water cups and crashes the system while, in a second one, the AI repeatedly requests that the person ordering add more drinks to their order.
Since 2023, Taco Bell has added AI to over 500 of its drive-thrus, with the goals of speeding up the taking of orders, reducing mistakes, and cutting labor costs by up to 20%. Not unrelatedly, its parent company Yum Brands acquired Dragonfly, an AI-driven restaurant management platform, back in 2021.
Last year, McDonald’s went through similar issues and announced that it was removing AI ordering technology from its drive-thrus in the United States altogether.
"After thoughtful review, McDonald's has decided to end our current global partnership with IBM on AOT [Automated Order Taking] beyond this year," said the restaurant chain in a statement.
McDonald’s added that it was confident that the technology would still be “part of its restaurants’ future.”
"We will continue to evaluate long-term, scalable solutions that will help us make an informed decision on a future voice ordering solution by the end of the year," the statement said.
