The first clue is usually the voice. It’s warm, it’s endlessly polite, it sprinkles in pleases and thank yous — and it’s just a little too pleasant to be human. Across thousands of US drive-thru lanes, fast food’s next big automation experiment is already taking your order, and most people don’t even realize it.
According to Intouch Insight’s annual Drive Thru Survey, roughly 4 percent of US fast-food locations used voice AI in the drive-thru in 2024. That figure climbed to 5 percent last year, and early research suggests it now sits around 6 percent. The momentum is unmistakable. Taco Bell announced in July that it has rolled AI out to 890 drive-thru lanes — more than 10 percent of its US restaurants. Dairy Queen is deploying the tech across 25 states with plans to reach every location. And at White Castle, an AI named Julia now handles orders at 12 percent of restaurants, with every new location opening under her watch.
It wasn’t always this smooth. McDonald’s kicked off the craze back in 2019, acquiring startup Apprente and folding it into McD Tech Labs. When the pandemic supercharged drive-thru traffic, rivals piled in: Del Taco and Dairy Queen partnered with Presto, Panda Express and White Castle with SoundHound, Taco Bell with Nvidia and Omilia. Then came the reality check.
If you searched “AI drive-thru” in 2023, you found chaos. There was the viral clip of McDonald’s AI piling 260 Chicken McNuggets onto an order as customers screamed for it to stop. There was bacon added to an ice cream order. There was the guy who ordered 18,000 cups of water at Taco Bell just to break it. Beyond the memes, Intouch Insight found early AI agents were less friendly than humans, less accurate, and easily tripped up by accents and dialects.
McDonald’s eventually sold McD Tech Labs to IBM and pulled the plug. But others — Dairy Queen, White Castle, Taco Bell — kept quietly refining. Four years into White Castle’s SoundHound partnership, CMO Jamie Richardson says Julia has won over employees and smoothed out shifts. On average, Intouch Insight finds AI drive-thrus now beat the industry by 21 seconds.
The pendulum has swung back. McDonald’s is testing AI ordering again this summer, this time with Google at five US locations, handling both English and Spanish.
Here’s the twist: executives insist the bots aren’t stealing jobs, and the data mostly agrees — White Castle’s headcount held steady, and Taco Bell reports higher retention at AI-equipped sites. What AI really does is upsell, relentlessly. Intouch Insight found AI agents deploy suggestive selling 71 percent of the time, versus a 58 percent industry average. The robot is shameless about that extra Snickers on your Blizzard.
Not everyone’s sold. Chick-fil-A, Dutch Bros and 7Brew have all stuck with humans, betting on genuine connection. Yet Intouch Insight reports a striking 97 percent satisfaction rate for the tech. The era of the headset, it seems, is entering its final gasps.
