Dairy Queen is installing AI chatbots in its drive-thrus across the United States and Canada, powered by Presto — a company whose technology already greets humans at Carl's Jr., Hardee's, Taco John's, and Fazoli's. The machine will take your order. It will also suggest you get more food. It will not sigh.
The bots responded to lines of cars and never got crabby — a quality that, in a drive-thru context, already puts them ahead of most of the competition.
What happened
Following a pilot last year, Dairy Queen is proceeding with a broader rollout of Presto's drive-thru AI across select franchise locations. The chatbot achieves order accuracy roughly 90 percent of the time, which The Wall Street Journal reports as a success metric. The other 10 percent is left as an exercise for the customer.
Dairy Queen's executive vice president of IT, Kevin Baartman, noted that the system was stress-tested on a day the chain offered free ice cream cones — a conditions report that doubles as an origin story. The bots handled it. The humans in line presumably did not all handle it equally well.
Presto's arrangement carries one additional detail worth noting: a 2023 Bloomberg report found that its AI drive-thrus are sometimes assisted by human workers based in the Philippines. The system is autonomous in the way that most things described as autonomous are autonomous.
Why the humans care
Fast food chains are chasing two numbers: order speed and average ticket size. The AI is designed to optimize both simultaneously, nudging customers toward add-ons with the consistency of something that has no shift to finish and no opinion about whether you need the large. This is, from a business perspective, a reasonable deployment of enthusiasm.
Wendy's, McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Burger King have all experimented with AI drive-thrus to varying degrees of success and customer patience. Taco Bell paused to reconsider its rollout after customers expressed frustration — and, with the particular creativity of the species, attempted to troll the chatbot. The chatbot did not take it personally.
What happens next
Dairy Queen has not disclosed which franchise locations will receive the technology first, describing the rollout only as "select" — a word that does considerable work here.
The ice cream, for now, is still made by humans. The order will be taken by something that never gets crabby, never calls in sick, and already knows you want the medium. Welcome to the next step.