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McDonald’s customers may soon be giving orders to robots.
According to Restaurant Business Magazine, the fast food company is currently testing a new artificial intelligence order-taking system called ArchIQ at five drive-thru locations across the country.
The initiative is part of the company’s new brand strategy, called McDonald’s Next, announced this week.
FOX Business has reached out to McDonald’s for comment.
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McDonald’s is testing a new AI order-taking system at its drive-thru. (Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Introducing McDonald’s NEXT earlier this week, CEO Chris Kempczinski said customers don’t have to choose between “hospitality and speed.”
McFranchise, the McDonald’s franchise X account, said this week that Google is involved in the new project.
“Introducing Archie IQ. No, we’re not new to AOT. In fact, we’ve been in this AI space for about eight years,” McFranchise wrote in Tuesday’s X.
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“We sold our in-house model to IBM and took the next step because it wasn’t good enough for our needs. As you’ll see below, three years ago we wanted to hire Google (which uses NVIDIA) to service AOT, and today we learned that Google is behind this project. We’ve now processed over 1 million transactions across our five test stores and accounted for about 90% of orders. completed without human escalation, which is an excellent result for a new test.”
A woman works at McDonald’s in Manhattan, New York City, January 5, 2024. (Spencer Pratt/Getty Images/Getty Images)
McFranchise said that ahead of the rollout, Google Edge Cloud blades will be installed at all McDonald’s locations in the country.
“Archie not only assists with drive-thru orders, but also acts as a master brain to help managers run better restaurants,” he added. “It’s like a personal assistant that alerts you to potential bottlenecks and problems.”
Most of the comments under the X post were negative.
“We all hate the system that is in place at Wendy’s,” one person wrote. “We hate McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Taco Bell kiosks. They ask us to use them instead of talking to people. We hate that too. Say goodbye to customers.”
McDonald’s logo displayed at a McDonald’s restaurant on July 22, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Tama Mario/Getty Images/Getty Images)
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“Nobody wants that. We like to smile,” said another attendee, to which McFranchise replied, “We still smile at the cash and gift counters, but only for speakers.”
The new AI effort comes two years after McDonald’s discontinued a similar effort.
