Dairy Queen is the latest fast food giant to experiment with AI-powered drive-thrus.
This week, the company revealed plans to roll out this technology to some of its restaurants across Canada and the U.S. The goal behind the voice AI is to speed-up drive-thru service times and encourage customers to add more food.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Dairy Queen confirmed that this tech will be used at several dozen franchised locations out of the 3,000 it operates between the two countries. It’s unclear exactly where in Canada the testing will take place.
Dairy Queen has partnered with Silicon Valley AI voice tech company Presto on the initiative, which follows a smaller test in the U.S. last year. According to Dairy Queen, the bots improved customer-satisfaction scores by double-digit percentages. That said, we’ve seen many incidents of AI-powered drive-thrus going wrong, like ones at McDonalds mistakenly giving hundreds of dollars’ worth of chicken nuggets or topping an ice cream with bacon. In other cases, we’ve seen customers deliberately mess with the system, like a man asking for 18,000 cups of water at Taco Bell.
It’s unclear if and when Dairy Queen plans to more widely roll out AI-powered drive-thrus.
Image credit: Dairy Queen
Source: Dairy Queen, The Wall Street Journal Via: The Verge
