Nexalytics Tech
Retail-AI headlines have a habit of overshooting reality, and the automated drive-thru is a clear example of that — but not in the direction most coverage suggests. McDonald's did shut down its highest-profile voice-ordering pilot, built with IBM, back in 2024, and has confirmed no replacement rollout since. That part of the story is true and worth stating plainly. What's not true is the broader idea that voice AI at the drive-thru speaker box quietly died along with it: several of McDonald's competitors have spent the past two years scaling that exact category of technology to hundreds of restaurants, even as the sector's own history shows real reasons to be skeptical about how much of that "AI" is actually automated.
What Actually Happened at McDonald's
McDonald's began testing automated order-taking (AOT) with IBM in 2021, the same year it sold its McD Tech Labs unit to IBM. The pilot ran voice-ordering technology at more than 100 U.S. restaurants for roughly three years. In June 2024, McDonald's confirmed it was ending the partnership, telling CNBC: "After thoughtful review, McDonald's has decided to end our current partnership with IBM on AOT. IBM remains a trusted partner and we will continue to utilize many of their other products across our system." The company shut the technology off in every restaurant that had been testing it no later than July 26, 2024. McDonald's has separately worked with Google Cloud since announcing a partnership at its December 2023 investor day on broader cloud and AI initiatives, and it has said it hasn't ruled out a future voice-ordering system — but as of this writing in 2026, no McDonald's drive-thru AI rollout, Google-backed or otherwise, has been confirmed.
Voice Ordering Didn't Disappear — It Moved to Rivals
While McDonald's pilot stalled, competitors scaled similar technology well past the pilot stage. White Castle rolled out SoundHound's AI voice-ordering technology to about 100 drive-thru lanes by the end of 2024, following a pilot that began in Chicago in January 2022. Taco Bell expanded its own Voice AI ordering system to hundreds of U.S. locations by the end of 2024. Wendy's has gone furthest: its FreshAi system, built with Google Cloud and Accenture, was running at more than 160 restaurants as of May 2025, and the company said at the time it was on track to reach more than 500 restaurants with FreshAi and digital menu boards by the end of that year. Restaurant-technology vendor Presto Automation separately supplies voice-ordering AI to chains including Checkers, Rally's, Carl's Jr., Hardee's, Del Taco, and Dairy Queen. None of this means McDonald's specific approach worked — it didn't — but it does mean the technology category kept expanding elsewhere while McDonald's own pilot was being switched off.
The Catch: How Much of This Is Actually AI?
The reason for lingering skepticism isn't that voice ordering stalled everywhere; it's that one of the industry's largest vendors was caught overstating how automated its system really was. In January 2025, the SEC settled charges against Presto Automation for making "materially false and misleading statements" about its Presto Voice product in filings and public statements made between November 2021 and May 2023. The SEC's order found that for a period, the AI speech-recognition technology in every Presto Voice unit the company had deployed was actually owned and operated by a third party, a fact Presto had not disclosed. After Presto began deploying units powered by its own AI, it claimed the product eliminated the need for human order-taking — but the SEC found that "the vast majority of drive-thru orders placed through this version of Presto Voice required human intervention," and that Presto had misleadingly disclosed its own reported rate of fully automated orders. Presto, which had been listed on Nasdaq until September 2024, cooperated with the investigation and received a cease-and-desist order rather than a financial penalty. Restaurant Dive has separately reported that Presto uses human workers based in the Philippines as a backstop when its AI cannot complete an order — a practice a company representative described as standard across the AI industry rather than an attempt to disguise labor costs as automation. None of this proves any specific chain is overstating its drive-thru AI today, but it is a documented recent case of exactly that happening at scale, which is reason enough to treat rollout announcements with some caution until independent numbers on automation rates are available.
Where the Cleanest Retail AI Wins Are Happening
Away from the speaker box, two retail AI tools have moved past the pilot stage with far less controversy. Instacart's Caper Carts — shopping carts with built-in cameras and screens that scan items as shoppers add them, letting them skip the checkout line — have expanded to more than 100 cities across 15 states since their initial rollout. Weis Markets, a Mid-Atlantic grocery chain, began adding Caper Carts to select Pennsylvania stores in June 2026, with additional locations planned later in the year; Weis's own announcement quoted the company's chief information officer, Greg Zeh, saying the carts offer "a convenient and frictionless shopping experience." Separately, Amazon's Rufus shopping assistant — a conversational AI tool that launched in beta in February 2024 and reached all U.S. shoppers within months — was folded into a broader assistant rebranded "Alexa for Shopping" in May 2026, though the Rufus name still appears as the icon shoppers tap to ask product questions inside the Amazon app. Both tools share a trait the McDonald's pilot lacked: a narrow, well-defined task — scanning items or answering product questions — rather than open-ended natural-language ordering that has to be completed correctly on the first try, under time pressure, with a car idling behind it.
💡 The Nexalytics Take
The real story of AI at the drive-thru isn't that it failed — it's that the category split in two directions at once. McDonald's specific bet with IBM didn't work and hasn't been replaced, while Wendy's, White Castle, and Taco Bell kept scaling voice ordering to hundreds of locations each. What should make readers cautious isn't the technology's ambition, it's the track record: the SEC caught one major vendor overstating how much of its "automated" ordering was actually human labor in the Philippines and elsewhere. Retail AI's cleanest wins in 2026 — scan-as-you-shop carts, in-app shopping assistants — are boring by design and never have to understand a rushed, mumbled order through a car window. That's exactly why they've drawn less scrutiny, not because the underlying technology is more advanced.
