McDonald's pulls plug on IBM drive-thru AI

If you have ever had an AI chatbot at a drive-thru confidently butcher your lunch order, McDonald's just bought you some relief.

The fast-food giant is officially ending its two-year pilot of automated order taking with IBM. According to an internal email sent to franchisees and obtained by Restaurant Business, the system will be shut off across more than 100 test locations no later than July 26, 2024.

Parting with IBM, but not with voice tech

The partnership kicked off back in 2021 when McDonald's sold its McD Tech Labs division to IBM to build a voice system that could speed up service and trim labor costs. Two years later, the chain decided against expanding the rollout.

While viral social media clips have shown drive-thru bots handing out dozens of unwanted ice creams and confusing bacon with butter, McDonald's insisted the concept itself is not dead. Mason Smoot, chief restaurant officer for McDonald's USA, told operators the test gave the company confidence that voice ordering will still be part of its future.

Smoot noted that the company plans to evaluate broader voice solutions and make an informed decision on a future partner by the end of the year. Meanwhile, IBM stated that its automated order taker remains fast and accurate in demanding conditions, adding that it is in discussions with other fast-food brands to deploy the technology elsewhere.

The messy race to automate the drive-thru

Fast food operators are desperate to automate the order window to curb rising labor expenses. Chains like Carl's Jr., Hardee's, Dunkin, and Taco John's have all jumped into automated order experiments.

Wendy's partnered with Google last year to test generative voice ordering, a pilot it has since expanded. White Castle has leaned on speech recognition vendor SoundHound. In a bizarre twist of the industry's rush to automate, regulatory filings recently revealed that drive-thru tech used by some competitors relied heavily on human contractors working remotely in the Philippines rather than actual machine autonomy.

McDonald's itself signed a partnership with Google last December. While details remain vague, reports suggest that work includes an internal chatbot named Ask Pickles to help workers maintain notoriously finicky ice cream machines.

Why it matters

We think pulling the plug on IBM after a 100-store trial is a smart, pragmatic move from McDonald's rather than a defeat.

For consumers, drive-thru ordering is entirely about speed and accuracy. If an AI mishears an accent or hallucinates an extra order of fries, saving a few dollars on crew wages instantly destroys customer goodwill. Halting a buggy deployment before a nationwide rollout protects the brand while the underlying technology matures.

For the restaurant tech space, this marks the end of the first, clumsy wave of rule-based voice bots. Handling ambient engine noise, overlapping cross-talk, and highly custom orders demands modern multimodal frontier models, not retrofitted legacy stacks. And as competitor scandals showed, faking AI with offshore remote workers is an unsustainable parlor trick.

McDonald's is not abandoning voice. By clearing the deck, it looks poised to test deeper implementations with modern tech giants like Google by year-end. The automated drive-thru is still coming, but fast food giants are finally learning that bad AI is far more expensive than human labor.