260 chicken nuggets, bacon on ice cream: voice AI met the real drive-thru
McDonald's × IBM · 2021–2024
What they did
From 2021, McDonald's piloted an IBM-built voice-AI order-taking system at more than 100 U.S. drive-thrus, aiming to automate the highest-volume, most repetitive part of front-line labor.
What happened
In real conditions — background noise, overlapping voices, accents, lane crosstalk — the system misfired often enough to go viral for it: adding unwanted items, mixing up orders between adjacent lanes, and failing to understand customer corrections, in clips showing orders like 260 chicken nuggets or bacon added to ice cream. McDonald's ended the IBM partnership in June 2024, with the system fully shut off by late July, saying it would look for a different voice-AI vendor rather than abandoning the idea entirely.
The so-what
A demo-clean voice interface and a real drive-thru lane are different acoustic environments; McDonald's didn't conclude "AI ordering is impossible," it concluded this specific system wasn't ready for the noise floor of the job it was hired to do.