McDonald’s customers may soon be giving their order to a robot.
The fast food company is testing a new artificial intellience order-taking system at the drive-thru called ArchIQ at five locations across the country right now, according to Restaurant Business Magazine.
The initiative is part of the company’s new brand strategy called McDonald’s Next, which was announced this week.
FOX Business has reached out to McDonald’s for comment.
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While introducing McDonald’s NEXT earlier this week, CEO Chris Kempczinski said that customers shouldn’t have to choose between “hospitality or speed.”
McFranchisee, an X account for a McDonald’s franchise, said this week that Google is affiliated with the new project.
“Meet Archy IQ – no, we are not new to AOT. In fact, we have been in this AI field for about 8 years,” McFranchisee wrote on X on Tuesday.
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“We sold our in-house model to IBM and moved on as it wasn’t good enough for our needs. As mentioned below, I wanted to hire Google (who uses NVIDIA) to service our AOT 3 years ago and found out today that Google is behind this project. We are currently in 5 test stores, having processed over 1M transactions with about 90% of orders completed without human escalations. Impressive for a new test.”
McFranchisee said that every McDonald’s in the country will get Google Edge Cloud blades installed ahead of the rollout.
“Archy will not only assist drive-thru orders but act as a master brain to help managers run a better restaurant,” it added. “It’s like a personal assistant that alerts you to potential bottlenecks or issues.”
Most of the comments under the X post were negative.
“We all hate the system installed at Wendy’s,” one person wrote. “We hate the kiosks at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell that we are asked to use instead of talking to a person. We will hate this too. Say goodbye to customers.”
“No one wants this – we like dealing with smiling faces,” another said, to which McFranchisee replied, “We still smile at the cash and present window – this is just at the speaker.”
The new A.I. initiative comes two years after McDonald’s dropped another similar effort.
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