'Bacon on Ice Cream'... McDonald's Embarrassed by AI Unable to Take Orders

End of Collaboration with IBM... Complete Withdrawal of Order AI

American fast-food franchise McDonald's has decided to discontinue its ambitious 'Drive-Thru Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ordering' service, which was introduced in collaboration with IBM. This comes three years after partnering with IBM in 2021 to automate ordering. Frequent order errors meant that orders often still had to be handled by employees.

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According to foreign media including the BBC on the 22nd (local time), McDonald's announced that the AI ordering service, which was introduced at about 100 drive-thru locations in October 2021, will end on the 26th of next month.

McDonald's AI service introduction attracted significant attention at the time. Chris Kempczinski, McDonald's CEO, confidently stated, "The voice recognition accuracy of this service reaches about 85%. Employees will only need to intervene in one out of every five orders," prompting other competitors to follow suit. There was great expectation that AI would save labor costs.

However, the results were dismal. Employees were busy fixing errors made by the AI chatbot. The main cause of errors was analyzed to be external noise, due to the nature of drive-thru orders being placed from inside vehicles. On the short-form platform TikTok, videos under the keyword 'McDonald's AI drive-thru errors' became popular. For example, customers who ordered water and vanilla ice cream ended up with butter and coffee cream added, or chicken nuggets worth hundreds of dollars were ordered. There were even cases where ice cream with added bacon was served.

Google will replace IBM's role. McDonald's plans to partner with Google to introduce AI chatbots that assist employees at stores across the United States. The chatbot, called 'Ask Pickles,' is designed to support employee tasks, and generative AI programs will also be applied to ordering kiosks, the McDonald's mobile app, and drive-thru services.

IBM still plans to collaborate with McDonald's on other projects. The IT media outlet The Verge reported, "McDonald's is soon to introduce Google's work support chatbot 'Ask Pickles' and is exploring other ways to utilize AI."