Friday night: the sky is a portrait of an orange sun and gray clouds, and you just finished school when your stomach growls. So you pull into a fast-food drive-thru, ready to order, but instead of a human voice, the sound that comes out is replaced with something mechanical.

Surveys show that 63% of restaurants use some form of AI daily to improve customer service. At the same time, 52% of brands report a strong impact on customer experience, with 72% of corporate executives saying they plan to increase AI budgets in the coming years—showing a rising demand for robot automation.

“There is the Taco Bell next to my second job,” senior Wyatt Whitney said. “They were one of the first to try the AI order taker, but from what I’ve seen, it’s basically the same thing. The worker still has the headset on, but it’s just the AI taking orders.”

Fast food restaurants first adopted AI in 2019 with improvements to digital ordering pads and recommendation systems, with McDonald’s being one of the first major chains to test AI by using dynamic menu boards that changed based on weather, time of day, and past orders. Other chains, like Starbucks, quickly followed with predictive ordering through their app. 

“Around early last year, my mom wanted to grab some Popeyes, so we went into the drive-through,” senior Khelan Norva said. “But, there wasn’t anyone to take our order. Instead, it was just an AI voice box, and it took like, eight minutes to get our order through. [Overall], it was very buggy and just a pain to deal with.

Chains like Wendy’s “FreshAi” and Taco Bell’s AI have already rolled out automated voice assistants in hundreds of drive-thru and kiosks. Restaurant owners also used AI by letting it upgrade legacy point of sales (POS) systems, implementing dynamic pricing (changing price based on variables), labor/scheduling, and lastly, inventory control.

AI in Food Industry by Kevin Zhao

“I went to Taco Bell, and I could already tell that it was an AI voice,” senior Selinalei Hamilton said. “ It was a little weird, I’m not gonna lie. Taking orders is actually one of the easiest jobs to do in fast food. I think that [the use of AI] makes the worker lack these skills. You don’t need AI, it’s just companies wanting to be cheap.”

More concerns about AI were also raised, with 45 percent of consumers saying they “do not like the idea” of AI taking their drive-thru order, pitching their concerns for privacy and voice recordings. Employees have also voiced their frustration with the system, having to deal with an automated system that cannot adjust its pace.

“The problem is it can’t skip any of the questions we’re supposed to ask: ‘Would you like to round up? Would you like a large Pepsi?’ and that slows everything down,” Whitney said. “We’re timed to get cars out in under three minutes and 30 seconds, so when the AI takes 30 seconds for each question, it makes our time worse.”

Workers also faced job insecurity, expressing their fear of either loss of hours or pay. A restaurant consulting firm has stated that 80% of roles in restaurants can eventually be automated. And with each passing day and the huge advancement of technology over the years, blue-collar and white-collar workers are afraid of their jobs being replaced altogether by AI-controlled technology.

“I think (AI) does cause job insecurity, because a lot of people run order taking (drive-thru now),” Hamilton said. “So I think you don’t need that, so that people can have a job, it is just) Companies are trying to be futuristic, cutting down on labor costs.

AI can be a double-edged sword; while it can make the average person’s everyday life easier, it can also, at the same time, make the white and blue-collar workers much harder. 

“It’s already replacing front cashiers, and it’s a lot harder for a lot of other people to get a job,” Norva said. “For me, I had a really tough time trying to get even an entry-level job at McDonald’s because it’s already oversaturated with a bunch of entry-level workers. Now that it incorporates AI, job security is even worse for teens. As companies start to get comfortable with it, it will probably be utilized a lot more in the upper levels as well, and it’s probably going to spread [in the near future].”