McDonald's Couldn't Do It. This Fast Food Chain Did It

Is this the beginning of a revolution in fast food? McDonald’s failed in this area and withdrew from the project, but the implementation was successful for a Mexican restaurant chain. It introduced chatbots to the process of ordering meals from a car.

American fast food chain Taco Bell introduces artificial intelligence to the process of ordering meals from a car. After a pilot phase in 13 states, the chatbot system will now be expanded to the entire US and eventually to other countries where Taco Bell is present.

After two years of working on an ordering system using AI technology, we are confident that it is an effective model that will optimize our operations and ensure a high level of customer satisfaction.

– says Taco Bell board member responsible for innovation, Lawrence Kim.

Chatbot will take your order and process it

The fast food chain’s artificial intelligence system will be implemented in existing drive-thru ordering machines. Previously, the machines were operated by employees. Now, the ordering driver will pass on his choice to a chatbot. The latter will then display the order details on the screen and, after confirmation, will submit the order for execution.

Taco Bell sees only benefits in this solution. It lists them in a press release:

Thanks to the changes, we will relieve our employees, improve the accuracy of orders by avoiding errors, provide customers with a high and uniform level of service in every location. What’s more, the waiting time for a meal will be shorter and our locations will be more profitable.

McDonald’s has failed in this area.

While Taco Bell has extensively tested and is confident in its solution, previous attempts at working with AI by competing fast food chains have not been successful. Just recently, McDonald’s introduced chatbots to its restaurants via McDrive. After a series of errors that were quickly caught by customers and made a big “career” in social media, also known in Poland the network quickly withdrew from the project. We can still find examples of orders online in which the McDonald’s robot, for example, mistakenly adds 28 Chicken McNuggets to the order.