A Mos Food Services employee places an order via a microphone at an artificial intelligence drive-thru facility, which was unveiled to members of the media in Yoshikawa City, Saitama Prefecture, on Wednesday. The Japanese hamburger chain aims to improve store management efficiency by automating part of customer interaction with conversational AI amid a serious labor shortage. The company plans to introduce the new AI system at multiple outlets in fiscal 2026, which begins in April. In a media demonstration held at a store in the city of Yoshikawa, Saitama Prefecture, a Mos Food employee acting as a customer spoke into a microphone to place a drive-thru order. The AI system took the order after making suggestions such as, We recommend a limited-time avocado burger. Once the system is introduced, store employees will prepare food based on customer orders transmitted from the AI system.

Many people have experienced ordering fast food in a drive-thru and opening the bag later to find their French fries are missing, or their burgers are covered in ketchup they did not want. Artificial intelligence (AI) may make ordering food through a talking box easier, faster and more accurate. You may not have to wait long for AI to take your next drive-thru order. Checkers & Rally's are joining McDonald's MCD on the list of fast food restaurants that are testing voice-ordering bots in their drive-thrus. Through a partnership with Presto, the company plans to install the AI-based voice assistant in 267 restaurants.

Customers using the drive-thru at 10 McDonald's locations in Chicago are not ordering burgers and fries with human employees, but machines using artificial intelligence. The fast-food chain is testing voice recognition software at select locations that has shown to be 85 percent accurate – but 20 percent of orders need human intervention, CNBC reports. CEO Chris Kempczinski made the announcement Wednesday, but also explained that the software may not roll out to all of the fast-food chain's 14,000 locations. 'Now there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S., with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather -- and on and on and on,' Kempczinski said, per CNBC. The technology, according to McDonald's, aims to shorten the wait at the drive-thru by a yet to-be determined amount of time.

The poor quality of drive-thru ordering may be an old joke (and a staple of comedy movies), but it's also a problem that could benefit from a high-tech overhaul. Machine learning and voice recognition can ease the many pain points of this encounter, contends Denver technology entrepreneur Rob Carpenter, the CEO of Valyant AI. Carpenter's company has developed an artificial intelligence platform that automates fast-food customer service, order-ahead, drive-thru and in-store sales, with technology in development to integrate more directly with point of sale systems. Valyant AI was a recent finalist at a developer program at Visa, and is reportedly in discussions with McDonald's, Walmart and advisors from Yum Brands. Carpenter did not identify his clients, saying the first deployment would come in about four weeks.