Jonathan Maze writing for Restaurant Business: McDonald's Is Ending Its Drive-Thru AI Test

McDonald’s is ending its two-year-old test of drive-thru, automated order taking (AOT) that it has conducted with IBM and plans to remove the technology from the more than 100 restaurants that have been using it.

But fear not, they’re still looking into it!

But the company did not dismiss the prospect of drive-thru AI, suggesting that McDonald’s plans to find a new partner for its automated order taking efforts.

We’ll see, but a couple years into this whole AI boom is revealing what use cases are actually useful and what ones are empty hype. While I do think that LLMs offer genuinely useful features that will be with us for many, many years, I also think that we’re living through a hype cycle, and eventually those big promises need to turn into actual, useful products. We’ve gotten to the point where lots of these “A.I.” features have been around long enough that companies are seeing how few of them are actually delivering the results they hoped for.