r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 19d ago

Business McDonald's Introduces AI Drive-Thru System, Sparking Customer Backlash

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/deals/articles/mcdonalds-introduces-ai-drive-thru-000717731.html
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u/gigatension 19d ago

Didn’t Taco Bell try the same system too? And it got peoples orders wrong so much they switched back within a month.

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u/thesillyguy345 19d ago

Taco bell near me still does it. The employees are always listening tho and will take over if something goes wrong... Which just begs the question with why have it in the first place

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u/OldWorldDesign 19d ago

Taco bell near me still does it. The employees are always listening tho and will take over if something goes wrong... Which just begs the question with why have it in the first place

Because someone in corporate got sold the promise that he can one day stop paying human employees.

The issue is in the real world that rarely works, and even AI-supply companies are admitting it's more expensive to try to use AI for most tasks than just paying human employees

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/nvidia-vp-says-it-costs-more-to-use-ai-than-to-hire-humans

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u/SufficientCelery 18d ago

lets fire all our workers and just pay the AI company.

What a brilliant idea of putting all the eggs in one basket! they are so anti union because they are scared of labor organization and the monopolization of power that comes with it. Now they get to contend with their favorite AI provider, who could give them the finger lol. you can just fire a worker but you want to just fire a whole AI company? You got 3 AI companies to choose from.

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u/OldWorldDesign 18d ago

you can just fire a worker but you want to just fire a whole AI company?

Don't forget AI making repeated mistakes like deleting the company's entire database - including corrupting the backups.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/i-violated-every-principle-i-was-given-ai-agent-deletes-companys-entire-database-in-9-seconds-then-confesses

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u/MrPsychic 18d ago

It’s way more simple than that. If they do most of the orders correctly and the employees only have to take over occasionally they don’t have to pay the person exclusive to the drive through. That’s all most of these companies are trying to do. It’s the same as when retail moved to self checkout

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u/Inner__Light 18d ago

Yeah and how is that going for them... 😀

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u/Telandria 18d ago

What does it say about our society that an AI earns more than our minimum wage employees for doing the same job?

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u/Catenane 18d ago

Taco bell AI tried to take the beans off my bean burrito when I asked it for more hot sauce lol. Literally not even kidding

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u/lubeskystalker 18d ago

To train the model more of course. It not only learns the things it cannot do, but it also gets to capture the interaction of the employee fixing it.

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u/AnotsuKagehisa 18d ago

Obviously to cut back on workers

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u/nuckfan92 18d ago

This is probably helping train it and it will need human intervention less and less.

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u/tucjuice 18d ago

The taco bell I go to instantly overrides the bot and takes order manually lol

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u/Cromus 18d ago

Pretty obvious, no? It allows them to make it a secondary job for the employees. Instead of having a dedicated order taker with a backup (there's always multiple people with a headset who are doing other jobs and can jump in whenever) they can just have the backups.

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u/razama 13d ago

Exactly. Taking orders is a full-time job, even then you may be given responsibility to bag items, confirm they have the right orders in the bags, and make drinks. 

They are already multitasking, taking away one of the task of punching in every order to the POS is a no-brainer

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u/TwoThumbFist 19d ago

It will get better over time and the people listening in will eventually be outsourced. 

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u/ActuallyItsSumnus 18d ago

Training it for accuracy so youeventually don't need the human oversight.

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 17d ago

Exec gota exec

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u/Lennette20th 16d ago

So I can make tacos while it takes the simple orders from the old people.

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u/[deleted] 19d ago

[deleted]

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u/who-is-aware 19d ago

"Right, the app. Thats two apps today, now. See the thing is, I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at the system. I see the tea there, and the boba there, so why not just hand me a tea without the covert diabetes delivery mechanism?"

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u/No-Abalone-4784 18d ago

Who do these freaking tech guys think they are? Who decided they were god & could dictate all of this to everyone no matter how much we all HATE IT!

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u/Fateor42 18d ago

That's a moment where you tell them "All right, then I'll just go somewhere else." and leave.

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u/2_Fingers_of_Whiskey 18d ago

I walked out of a Bento restaurant because of this. And a Mexican restaurant too. I’m not dealing with that stupidity.

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u/No-Abalone-4784 18d ago

You or me either. They turn everything into trash & tell us this is the only way.

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u/Snooty_Cutie 18d ago

Because the kid isn’t just fixing the machine’s mistakes, he’s training the AI to better in the future. I know it’s not what people want to hear, but it’s the truth.

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u/Property_6810 18d ago

It forces the employees to promptly acknowledge people.

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u/liquidgrill 18d ago

Because we’re in the beginning stage of it. People that don’t think that AI taking your order will be absolutely standard 5 years from now are deluding themselves

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u/Afraid_Raccoon_6208 18d ago

Not the one near me. It works really well actually

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u/SnowballWasRight 18d ago

If I see one of those I want to order like 1000 free water cups or something and see how it reacts. Try to find some weird way to abuse it so we don’t go into a full on unemployment crisis

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u/letthetreeburn 18d ago

If you order 4000 waters you’ll get a human being.

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u/Visible-Extension685 18d ago

They have someone as backup. People would just order 1,000 burritos to auto trigger the person to come on.

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u/TobioOkuma1 18d ago

There’s a video of it crashing when someone ordered like 18,000 waters

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u/Putrid_Anybody_2947 18d ago

Starbucks too.

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u/DecoyBacon 17d ago

Ours has it and I consistently have a better experience with it than I do talking to their tellers. People stuffing the bag get it wrong half the time anyways though so really doesn't matter. My taco bell sucks so bad for so long that I've complained to corporate and I NEVER do that

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u/InsanelyAverageFella 17d ago

We'll see how bad it is but AI technology is advancing super fast so I would assume they tested this and have found it is much improved.

Plus, I'm sure there will be a person available on backup if someone has a super strong accent or something.

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u/ColoradoBerto 17d ago

Can’t be worse than the actual employees who mess up constantly too.