McDonald’s will stop testing AI to take drive-thru orders, for now

From the article

>The company will reportedly remove the tech from the over 100 restaurants it’s been testing the system in after [partnering with IBM in 2021](https://newsroom.ibm.com/Joint-Statement-from-McDonalds-and-IBM). It’s not clear why the company is ending the IBM deal, though. It told *Restaurant Business* it was testing whether the voice ordering chatbot could speed up service and that the test left it confident “that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurants’ future.”

>A potential option could involve the company’s [vague announcement of a Google deal](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/6/23990900/mcdonalds-google-ai-cloud-generative) in December. [*Bloomberg* reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-06/mcdonald-s-mcd-getting-ai-chatbot-from-google-googl-for-restaurant-crew) that the deal was partly for a chatbot named “Ask Pickles” that employees could use for guidance on things like cleaning ice cream machines. Even so, Google [partnered with Wendy’s](https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/9/23716825/wendys-ai-drive-thru-google-llm), which started testing drive-thru AI based on its tech last year and has since [expanded that trial](https://www.wendys.com/blog/drive-thru-innovation-wendys-freshai).

Please reinstate it’s a 50/50 chance getting sweet tea when I say unsweet tea or you can tell they dumped it out and put unsweet in it.

That “for now” came off as a threat in my mental voice.