The Drive-Thru Is Becoming a Robot

Dairy Queen is rolling out AI voice chatbots to dozens of drive-thru locations across the US and Canada. The company partnered with Presto — the same firm already deployed at Carl's Jr., Hardee's, Taco John's, and Fazoli's — after a pilot program that Kevin Baartman, Dairy Queen's executive vice president of information technology, told The Wall Street Journal delivered "double-digit percentage" improvements in customer satisfaction scores and roughly 90% order accuracy.

But Dairy Queen is far from alone. McDonald's fired the starting gun in 2021, deploying AI voice ordering at 10 Chicago locations after acquiring voice-tech startup Apprente in 2019 and later partnering with IBM to scale it. Checkers and Rally's went all-in on Presto across all corporate-owned US locations in 2022. Wendy's launched its "FreshAI" chatbot — built with Google — at a Columbus, Ohio location in 2023, training it on chain-specific slang so it knows a "Frosty" isn't a milkshake and a "JBC" is a junior bacon cheeseburger. Wendy's reported 86% order accuracy without employee intervention. Taco Bell was testing its own Voice AI simultaneously and planned to expand to hundreds of US locations by end of 2024, according to The Verge.

Panera Bread, White Castle, Panda Express, and Popeyes have all run trials. The restaurant AI market was valued at $9.68 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $49 billion within five years, according to Forbes contributor Kolawole Samuel Adebayo.

Why Chains Are Doing This

The math is simple. Forbes reports that 62% of quick-service restaurant leaders identify labor as their top challenge, and drive-thru lanes account for over 50% of QSR revenue. A system that never calls in sick, never needs a break, and can upsell a Blizzard topping at 11pm on a Tuesday is a CFO's dream.

Hi Auto, another voice AI platform for drive-thrus, told Forbes it now processes 100 million orders per year across hundreds of locations, claiming 93% order completion and 96% accuracy.

Chains also pitch this as good for workers — freeing staff from the headset so they can focus on food prep and customer service. Dairy Queen's Baartman specifically told the Journal that human employees will "simply review orders before they get sent out." Burger King deployed an OpenAI-powered chatbot called "Patty" directly into employees' headsets to help with meal prep — and, notably, to monitor whether workers say "please" and "thank you" to customers. That pilot reportedly ran in 500 restaurants.

What Most Coverage Is Leaving Out

The tech press and mainstream outlets are largely running with the industry's framing — faster service, happier customers, stressed workers get relief. What they're glossing over is a 2023 Bloomberg investigation into Presto's operations.

That investigation found that when Presto's AI can't understand an order — which happens more than the marketing admits — the system quietly routes the interaction to human workers based in countries like the Philippines to fill in the gaps. According to The Tech Buzz, which flagged this finding, these operators jump in behind the scenes to complete orders the AI fumbles.

If chains are paying human labor to backstop the AI, the cost savings look very different. And if they're marketing this as fully automated ordering while humans overseas are listening to your drive-thru conversation, customers deserve to know that.

Presto has not publicly disputed the Bloomberg reporting.

The Numbers Are Good — With Caveats

90% accuracy at Dairy Queen, 86% at Wendy's, 93% at Hi Auto — these are legitimately strong numbers for a technology still in its early deployment phase. Roy Baharav, Hi Auto's CEO, told Forbes that the remaining 7% of failed completions are intentional — the system is designed to hand off to a human when a customer raises an allergy concern or shifts from ordering to complaining. That's smart design, not a bug.

The technology works reasonably well for straightforward orders and falls apart on edge cases. That's exactly where human backup — whether on-site or overseas — comes in.

What This Means For Regular People

If you work a drive-thru, your job is changing whether you like it or not. Some of those changes might actually reduce your workload. Some of them will eliminate positions entirely — no company spends this much on automation to keep the same headcount.

If you're a customer, you're going to interact with these systems more and more. Most of the time it'll probably work fine. Sometimes you'll be talking to what you think is a robot and a person in Manila will be typing your Blizzard order.

And if you're a taxpayer watching government policymakers scramble to regulate AI — this is what's already happening in the real economy while Washington debates definitions.

The drive-thru got automated. The press release said so. The full story is more complicated.