Last year, Taco Bell made a simple bet that Alexa-like voice assistants could handle the drive-thru window. It didn’t consider whether people could handle dealing with AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company embedded AI in the drive-thru boxes at more than 500 locations across the country and quickly found that it made mistakes, creeped people out, and got very easily manipulated.
“We’re learning a lot, I’m going to be honest with you,” Taco Bell Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews told WSJ. One of the lessons: People really like messing with AI, like ordering “18,000 cups of water, please.” If you browse Taco Bell Reddit (a surprisingly vibrant community), there are employees and Bell Heads alike lamenting the AI takeover. One employee posted that the AI assistant started telling people that the restaurant was out of everything but drinks and sauce packets. A person attempting to order a Chalupa Supreme with onions from the AI assistant ended up with three chalupas, and when they tried to replace meat with beans, the AI simply refused.
So things are not going great, but that is not stopping Taco Bell from pushing forward with its AI embrace in one way or another. The fast food staple’s parent company, Yum Brands, announced a partnership with Nvidia earlier this year with the goal of improving the technology that powers its AI operations, including the order takers.
Taco Bell certainly isn’t alone in this effort, either. McDonald’s started infusing its operations with AI earlier this year, too, with the goal of improving order accuracy. Wendy’s partnered with Google to bring an AI chatbot to its drive-thru windows, and specifically started training the model on Wendy’s-specific lingo so it knows that JBC” is short for “junior bacon cheeseburger.” White Castle is getting in on the action, too, bringing AI to more than 100 of its drive-thrus with the help of speech recognition company SoundHound.
A quick scan suggests these efforts are going about as well as the Taco Bell experiment. McDonald’s reportedly ditched some of its AI interactions with customers after it kept messing up orders. People have also taken to social media to complain about having to deal with the Wendy’s AI chatbot, finding it to be inaccurate and creepy.
All of this seems to be leading to an inevitable conclusion that is entirely counterintuitive to the pitch of AI. Mathews, Taco Bell’s tech guy, told the Wall Street Journal that when a restaurant is super busy and has long lines, it is better for humans to handle it. Turns out, maybe replacing people with AI shouldn’t be on the menu.
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