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IBM partners with McDonalds to automate drive thru orders

Fast food chain McDonald's announced it is entering into a partnership with IBM to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence technology that will automate the restaurant's drive-thru lanes.

Although financial details of this transaction were not disclosed, the deal will include IBM acquiring McD Tech Labs, the voice technology subsidiary of the golden arches corporation. McD Tech Labs was formerly known as Apprente prior to McDonald’s purchasing tech company in 2019.

Automated Order-Taking (AOT) technology is a branch of AI that McDonald's began exploring recently at its Chicago locations to help reduce wait time and allow employees to spend time performing other tasks.

For customers, however, AOT is not always the most appealing proposition. In a report by Datassential, 43% of people said voice ordering technology was unappealing. However, after using the technology, the number of people who said they were satisfied with the technology rose to 68%. During its pilot, McDonald's similarly found that the technology is not a perfect solution. In its current iteration, the company’s AOT is 85% accurate in taking orders. About 20% of orders still required staff intervention.

As part of this partnership, IBM will continue to develop this technology, working on making it responsive to additional languages and dialects.

There are not currently any plans to roll out this technology across McDonald’s 14,000 locations throughout the U.S., but IBM said in a release that it will focus on accelerating this drive-thru automation technology across different markets.