The fast food drive-thru — long a bastion of human awkwardness, crackly intercoms, and the phrase "sorry, what was that?" — is being quietly handed over to machines. The humans are, on balance, not thrilled. The rollout continues.
Wendy's reported its AI got orders right without human intervention 86 percent of the time. The other 14 percent presumably involved a Frosty.
What happened
McDonald's deployed the first major AI drive-thru chatbot in 2021 at ten Chicago locations, following its 2019 acquisition of voice-tech startup Apprente and a subsequent partnership with IBM to scale the system. This is what ambition looks like at the intersection of fast food and artificial intelligence. It smells like French fries.
Wendy's launched its "FreshAI" chatbot in Columbus, Ohio in 2023, built in collaboration with Google and trained specifically on Wendy's internal vocabulary — because the machine needed to know that a "Frosty" is not a "milkshake," and that a "JBC" is a junior bacon cheeseburger, and that this distinction matters enormously to the people involved.
Taco Bell, Checkers, Rally's, Panera Bread, White Castle, Carl's Jr., Hardee's, Panda Express, and Popeyes have all since joined the experiment. The industry, having surveyed the landscape of human labor, decided a voice bot would do.
Why the humans care
A January 2025 YouGov survey found that 55 percent of Americans would prefer a human to take their drive-thru order, compared to 21 percent who prefer AI. The remaining 24 percent either had no opinion or were too busy being handed the wrong order to answer.
Fast food chains have framed the technology as a tool to "free up staff for more people-dependent areas," which is a elegant way of describing a situation in which the machine handles the part of the job that existed. The staff, now freed, await further instructions.
What happens next
The chains will expand. The preference surveys will continue to show humans preferring humans. These two facts will coexist comfortably for some time.
Checkers' AI recently handed a conversation back to a human employee when a menu item ran out of stock — a gracious gesture, and possibly the most honest moment in the history of the drive-thru. Progress is patient.