Voice AI is now taking orders at roughly 6% of US fast-food drive-thrus, up from 5% last year and 4% in 2024, according to Intouch Insight's annual Drive Thru Survey. Taco Bell has rolled the technology out to 890 lanes, more than 10% of its US locations, and announced the expansion in July. Dairy Queen is deploying it across 25 states with plans to reach every restaurant, and 12% of White Castle stores now open with an AI agent named Julia on the speaker.
The shift represents a second wind for a technology that most of the industry had written off two years ago. AI drive-thrus went from a viral punchline in 2023 to a production system quietly scaling across three of the largest US chains, with McDonald's re-entering the category this summer after abandoning it once already.
The economic case has narrowed to one specific behavior: upselling. Intouch Insight found that AI agents attempt suggestive selling 71% of the time, compared with 58% for human employees. That gap — 13 percentage points on every order — is what makes the technology pencil out even before headcount savings enter the model. AI-equipped lanes also move 21 seconds faster than the industry average and post a 97% customer satisfaction rate in Intouch's data.
Key facts
- 01Voice AI now runs at 6% of US fast-food drive-thrus, up from 5% last year and 4% in 2024, per Intouch Insight.
- 02Taco Bell has deployed AI at 890 drive-thru lanes, covering more than 10% of its US locations.
- 03AI drive-thrus use suggestive selling 71% of the time versus a 58% industry average for humans.
- 04AI-equipped lanes beat the industry average by 21 seconds and post a 97% customer satisfaction rate.
- 05McDonald's returned to AI ordering this summer with Google at 5 US locations after selling McD Tech Labs to IBM.
McDonald's kicked off the category in 2019 by acquiring Apprete and folding it into a division called McD Tech Labs. Del Taco and Dairy Queen partnered with Presto. Panda Express and White Castle went with SoundHound. Taco Bell built with Nvidia and Omilia. The pandemic drive-thru boom pushed every major chain to test at least one vendor.
The first wave broke. A viral TikTok showed McDonald's AI adding 260 Chicken McNuggets to a single order as customers begged it to stop. Another customer ordered 18,000 cups of water at Taco Bell. Del Taco rolled back its test in 2024. McDonald's sold McD Tech Labs to IBM and killed the deployment. Branded Hospitality, an investor in the category, exited its early positions.
The failures came down to fundamentals. Order accuracy lagged human workers. Accents and dialects broke the models. The cascading logic of a fast-food menu — combos, substitutions, modifiers — turned out to be harder than it looked. Most chains ended up staffing a human on a headset to intervene, which erased the labor savings that had justified the pilot.
White Castle stuck with SoundHound through four years of iteration rather than waiting for a perfect model. Chief marketing officer Jamie Richardson says shifts run more smoothly and service is faster, and the chain cracked Fortune's top 20 list of best workplaces in retail last year. Taco Bell has said locations running voice AI show higher employee retention. White Castle's total employment has held steady through the rollout.
That data point matters for the labor narrative around fast-food AI. The chains are not, so far, using voice agents to cut cashiers. Drive-thru workers multitask across ordering, cooking, and fulfillment, and pulling the ordering piece out has not yet translated into headcount reductions at the chains willing to share numbers. The margin gain is coming from upsell rate, not payroll.
McDonald's returned to the category this summer, partnering with Google at 5 US locations on a system that takes orders in English and Spanish. Branded Hospitality re-entered as well, backing Arc, a voice-AI vendor working with Jack's and Pollo Campero. Michael Schatzberg, the firm's cofounder, said the underlying tech has closed the gap on the problems that killed version one.
Not every chain is convinced. Chick-fil-A, which routinely tops Intouch Insight's friendliness rankings despite long lines, has never signaled a move to AI ordering. Dutch Bros and 7Brew, two of the fastest-growing US coffee chains, have publicly declined to deploy it. 7Brew CMO Nick Chavez said hospitality at the chain starts with human connection and that guests consistently cite it as the reason they come back.
The next capability layer is what Richardson calls the line the chains do not want to cross. AI systems can already recognize a returning car, pull an order history, and calculate that a given customer is 78% more likely to buy dessert on a specific weekday. Personalized upsell offers built on that data are technically ready to ship. Whether customers accept them, or file them under surveillance, is the open question the chains are testing carefully.
The AI drive-thru is the clearest live experiment in fast-food AI economics: a narrow, repetitive workflow where a 13-point upsell gap and a 21-second speed edge are enough to justify scaling even without labor cuts. If Taco Bell's 890 lanes and White Castle's 12% penetration hold their satisfaction numbers as the rollout accelerates, the ceiling on this category is national. The vendors who survived the 2023 washout — SoundHound, Omilia, Presto, Arc, and now Google — are the ones with the shot at owning it.
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