Yum Brands, the food giant that owns labels such as KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, inked a deal with Nvidia earlier this year to embrace an AI order-taking system. The target was to deploy the AI tech everywhere, from the kitchen to drive-through windows at more than 500 outlets.
“AI at the drive-thru window increases accuracy and speed of order-taking, and helps make team members’ jobs easier,” Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer at Yum! Brands, explained in a podcast. It seems those plans are susceptible to some hilarious glitches.
Apparently, it’s pretty easy to crash the system by something as simple as ordering thousands of water cups. In one clip that has gone viral on social media, Taco Bell’s AI at a drive-through can be seen going haywire after a customer ordered 18,000 water cups.
Drinks are the weak link for Taco Bell’s AI
In another clip, the AI is heard asking for a drink to go with an order for a large Mountain Dew. The AI order-taking agent even appears to malfunction when a customer asks, “Is the water free?” at which point a human customer support executive can be heard taking over.
This won’t be the first time that Taco Bell has tried to integrate technology in its customer-facing operations. In 2016, the food giant launched an AI-powered customer service system named TacoBot in partnership with workplace communication platform Slack.
It seems the top hierarchy is aware of the AI failures and is now carefully considering the deployment of such tools. “I think like everybody, sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me,” Taco Bell Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews was quoted as saying by The Wall Street Journal.
Mathews further added that the company was learning “a lot” from the experiment and that “it might not make sense to exclusively use artificial intelligence at every drive-through.” He pointed out that when there’s a customer rush with long waiting lines, a human employee might be best suited for the job.
It’s still uncharted territory
Taco Bell is not nixing its AI order manager at drive-throughs, but it will provide training to employees on monitoring the voice AI agent, and they should be ready to take over when necessary. But it seems the franchise is feeling the weight of risks and rewards of the tech stack.
“I think at the end of the day, it’s really, really early. And we feel that,” the Taco Bell executive added. Such product experiments haven’t always ended well, if history is any indication. McDonald’s pulled the plug on one such initiative that it developed in partnership with IBM last year.
But it seems food and restaurant businesses are bullish about AI making their work easier and reaping them financial rewards. Wendy’s has inked a similar AI deal with Palantir to ensure that its $1 Frosty promotions don’t lead to logistics chaos. McDonald’s also signed a deal with Google back in 2023 to integrate generative AI solutions in its business.
Taco Bell’s drive-through flub once again proves that AI agents are not yet ready to replace humans in all roles, despite all the hype. Even the most polished products out there such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews can prove to extremely harmful and get something as basic as the date wrong.
