“Future of our restaurants”
McDonald’s relies on AI for orders
17.06.2024, 07:35
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In the car queue at McDonalds, customers order their fast food from an employee. This could change in the future. After a test phase, the restaurant chain is convinced of the use of artificial intelligence.
McDonald’s plans to allow AI to take orders in restaurants over time. A test run at more than 100 locations of the fast-food restaurant chain in the USA will be terminated after around two years, as the trade publication “Restaurant Business” reported at the weekend, citing a message sent to the restaurants. However, the step, which was tested together with the computer company IBM, is not the end, McDonald’s made clear.
After the test experience, the company is convinced “that a solution for voice ordering in the drive-thru will be part of the future of our restaurants,” the US company emphasized in a statement to “Restaurant Business.” Various options are now being examined, and McDonald’s wants to decide on a technical solution by the end of the year.
Software with artificial intelligence is getting better and better at having conversations with people. Speech recognition is particularly useful for ordering in some restaurants, as it should be sufficient to know a manageable selection of words. So-called generative AI – as used in the chatbot ChatGPT, for example – can also formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human.
McDonald’s also entered into a partnership with Google in December to use generative AI, although the details of the deal initially remained unclear. US competitors such as the fast-food chains Wendy’s and Carl’s Jr. are also experimenting with the automated acceptance of spoken orders. It is unclear how quickly such solutions could be applied outside the US, as AI software is usually developed for English first.