Dairy Queen brings AI order takers to its drive-thrus

Fast food chains have spent decades trying to shave seconds off the drive-thru lane, and Dairy Queen thinks the answer is an AI that never gets tired of upselling you a Blizzard.

The ice cream and burger giant is rolling out an AI voice chatbot from Presto across dozens of drive-thrus in the US and Canada. The goal is twofold: get cars through the line faster and subtly coax customers into adding extra items to their orders, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The free ice cream stress test

Dairy Queen started testing the technology last year before deciding on a wider deployment. To see if it could handle real chaos, they tested the bot on Free Cone Day.

Kevin Baartman, Dairy Queen's executive vice president of IT, told The Wall Street Journal that lines of cars stretched around the building, but the AI handled the wave without missing a beat. His main takeaway was simple: the bots responded to endless lines and never got crabby.

According to The Journal, Presto's system correctly takes orders roughly 90 percent of the time. The vendor is already powering drive-thrus for brands like Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Taco John’s, and Fazoli’s.

Human backup and industry scars

While the concept sounds futuristic, the AI illusion has had its cracks. A 2023 Bloomberg report revealed that Presto's drive-thru system was partly assisted in real time by off-site human workers in countries like the Philippines who stepped in when the bot struggled.

Other fast food giants have had a rocky relationship with AI drive-thrus. Wendy’s partnered with Google in 2023, while McDonald’s scrapped a pilot with IBM after social media filled with hilarious ordering disasters. Taco Bell had to rethink its rollout after customers grew frustrated and took pleasure in trolling the bots. Meanwhile, Burger King is testing drive-thru AI in fewer than 100 locations, while placing bots inside employee headsets to monitor staff friendliness.

Why it matters

We think Dairy Queen’s move highlights an industry-wide scramble to cut labor overhead and enforce consistent upselling. Human cashiers get fatigued during an afternoon rush and forget to ask if you want extra fries. An algorithm never forgets, and as Dairy Queen noted, it never snaps back at an impatient driver.

However, a 90 percent accuracy rate is a double-edged sword. In speech benchmarks, 90 percent sounds respectable. In a drive-thru, it means one out of every ten cars might get an incorrect order, stalling the entire line behind them.

If human intervention is still needed to catch errors—whether locally or via offshore teams—the cost savings look far less dramatic. Unless Presto can close that remaining ten-percent reliability gap, automated drive-thrus risk alienating hungry patrons who just want their soft serve without having to debate a computer.