TL;DR
- Six restaurant technology trends deserve a place on a QSR operator’s 2026 watchlist. Most of them are driven by labor pressure and the guest experience, not by novelty.
- Labor is the top worry: 54% of franchise leaders in a TD Bank survey named a shrinking labor pool as their biggest concern.
- Operators are looking harder at the POS and data foundation, with 53% prioritizing the POS system, up from 40% the year before.
- Every trend lands at the drive-thru order point at the busiest hour, so start every technology decision there.
It is Monday morning. The agenda has six vendor proposals, three pilot requests and a budget line that will not stretch. Outside, the drive-thru lane is already eight cars deep and it is not yet 10 a.m.
The gap between that planning room and that lane is where restaurant technology trends either prove their worth or quietly disappear. This watchlist is written for the people who sit in both places: multi-unit owners, operations leaders and IT leaders in the QSR world.
How should you use this restaurant technology trends watchlist?
Each of the six trends follows the same three beats. What is happening in the market. What independent data says. What it means at the drive-thru order point, where so many of these decisions land hardest.
We kept the numbers to independent sources and named each one. Where Hi Auto shares its own figures, we say so. If you want the lane-level view of technology, our earlier post “QSR Technology Trends Shaping the Drive-Thru” covers it. This piece looks across the whole operation.
Trend 1: Is AI moving from curiosity to working tool?
Yes, slowly and unevenly. The National Restaurant Association’s 2026 findings, reported by Restaurant Dive in February 2026, show 26% of operators using AI-related tools. Only 6% of restaurants use AI for customer orders.
Interest is moving too. In an Informa Foodservice survey of nearly 500 operators, reported by Nation’s Restaurant News in March 2026, the share of operators not interested in using AI fell from 28% to 19% in a year.
Put those numbers side by side and the picture is clear. Many operators have started with AI in the back office. Very few have put it in front of the guest. The drive-thru is one of the places where that step is now being taken.
What does staying power look like? Operators who tried it and kept going. Jose Armario, CEO of Bojangles, said this about his franchisees:
“99% of the franchisees that have tried it have stuck with it.”
Jose Armario, CEO, Bojangles. QSR webinar “AI Order Taker That Works: The Bojangles Model”, July 2025. Watch the QSR webinar: Armario on franchise adoption
What it means at the order point: watch for a working tool, not a pilot that never leaves one store.
Trend 2: How does labor pressure shape every technology decision?
Labor is the lens for almost every purchase now. In a TD Bank survey of 253 franchise leaders, reported by Nation’s Restaurant News in December 2025, 54% of operators named a shrinking labor pool as their biggest concern in attracting and retaining talent in the year ahead. The same survey found labor efficiency, training and scheduling were the top areas where AI could be of use, at 40%.
Think about what a drive-thru crew member manages at the peak. One person can be on the headset, working on food, handling cash and watching the window at the same time. That load comes from how the job is built, not from anyone’s effort or attention.
Technology that lifts one of those jobs off the shift changes how the shift feels. Neil Pathak, a Bojangles franchisee, described it:
“From day one the biggest thing I noticed with having Bolinda in there, was that the crew members felt a sense of relief. The person that used to do cash, take orders, make drinks, they’re just so relaxed now compared to before.”
Neil Pathak, Owner, Star Enterprises (15 stores, Bojangles franchisee). Hi Auto customer video, 2025. Watch Neil Pathak on crew relief
Hi Auto customers report turnover reductions of 17-25% after deployment. See the glossary entry on employee turnover in QSR for the basics.
What it means at the order point: ask which task a tool takes off your crew at the busiest hour.
Trend 3: Why is the POS and data foundation becoming the priority?
After years of adding guest-facing tools, operators are turning to what sits underneath them. In the Informa Foodservice survey reported by Nation’s Restaurant News, point-of-sale systems were prioritized by 53% of operators, up from 40% the year before. One in five operators said data silos among vendors are one of the biggest tech stack challenges in 2026.
That makes sense. When your ordering tool, your loyalty program and your POS do not share data, you are managing several versions of the same transaction.
At the drive-thru, the order has to reach the POS reliably. If the POS integration is slow or unreliable, the kitchen screen and the confirmation board can both be wrong, and the crew has to step in to fix it. Every correction costs a few seconds and a bit of the guest’s patience. Hi Auto is live in stores with six POS systems: Genius by Global Payments (formerly Xenial), NCR Aloha, Lucas, PAR Brink, Oracle MICROS Simphony and Focus. The full list is on the partners page.
Analytics depend on the same clean connection. Reports on staffing and menu decisions are only as good as the data coming out of the order point.
What it means at the order point: check how the tool connects to your POS before you check anything else.
Trend 4: Does spending really follow the guest experience?
Increasingly, yes. In the NRA findings reported by Restaurant Dive, six in 10 operators said they plan to invest more in technology to enhance the customer experience. Roughly six in 10 millennials and Gen Z adults said they would place an order with an AI-generated bot.
That second number is about willingness, not a verdict on any product. It does tell you that a large group of guests is open to the idea.
At the drive-thru, the guest experience starts at the speaker. For many guests, the first few seconds set the tone: how warmly they are greeted, whether they are understood and whether the exchange feels easy. Food and the window matter enormously, but they come after that first impression.
What it means at the order point: treat the speaker as the front door of the restaurant, not a back-of-house tool.
Trend 5: What does voice ordering at the drive-thru order point look like at scale?
The useful question is no longer whether an AI order taker can work. It is what working looks like across many stores at the busiest hour.
Here is what independent research says. In Intouch Insight’s 2026 Drive-Thru Study (mystery shops in June and July 2026), order accuracy at locations of three national QSR brands running voice AI was 90.8%, against 86.7% for the same brands in the main study. Guests at those locations also had to repeat part of their order more often, on 29.1% of visits against 20.4%. The study covered 120 voice AI visits, and on 92 of them the AI took some or all of the order. These are industry findings, not Hi Auto figures.
QSR Magazine’s 2026 Drive-Thru Report (Danny Klein, 1 October 2026) looked at the 15 drive-thrus shopped where voice AI could not continue the order. The AI could not understand a customization request in 53.3% of those cases and could not answer a question in 40%.
Those numbers deserve an honest read. At Hi Auto, the AI handles the order. When it cannot confidently determine what the guest wants, a trained Hi Auto supervisor resolves it instantly through the platform, and every one of those moments is used to train the model further. The process is seamless to the guest and the restaurant.
Hi Auto processes 100M+ orders per year and reports 93%+ completion and 96% accuracy, always measured together, across more than 1,000 stores. Completion is the percentage of orders sent to the POS without staff intervention. Accuracy is the percentage of orders sent to the POS with every item and customization exactly right. A pilot is typically live in about 8 weeks, and the path from pilot to scale runs 90-120 days. These are Hi Auto’s own numbers, measured differently from the study above, so ask any vendor how theirs are measured.
Press hardest on reliability at scale: steady performance in every store on an ordinary Tuesday, not just the flagship where everything was set up perfectly.
What it means at the order point: compare completion and accuracy together, and look for results at scale, not only in a pilot.
Trend 6: How do you choose tools that fit the operation?
The market is loud. Operators are pitched tools built for retail and adapted for restaurants, tools that looked great in a controlled demo, and tools that need a dedicated IT team to keep running. The shift worth watching is a move toward tools that have proven themselves in the environment they have to work in.
At the order point, three things cut through the noise:
- Proven in the environment. Drive-thru audio is hard: engines, wind, overlapping voices and mid-sentence changes.
- Tested at scale. A five-store pilot proves little. Steady results across hundreds of stores on ordinary days prove a lot.
- Connected to the POS. Drive-thru automation only works if the order lands in the kitchen correctly, without re-entry.
The operators who get this right treat it as an operations project. Richard Del Valle of Bojangles said so directly:
“I think it really has been a wonderfully collaborative effort here at Bojangles because we’ve never treated this as an IT project. This has been a Bojangles project from day one all-inclusive including our franchise partners and our franchise business consultants and the team that helps franchises be successful.”
Richard Del Valle, Chief Information Officer and Chief of Staff, Bojangles. QSR webinar “AI Order Taker That Works: The Bojangles Model”, July 2025. Watch the QSR webinar: Del Valle on the Bojangles rollout
For a fuller evaluation matrix, Hi Auto’s Buyer’s Guide goes deeper.
What five questions should you ask before adding any tool?
Five questions separate a technology decision from a technology experiment.
- Has it been tested at the scale of my chain, not only in a pilot with ideal conditions?
- Does it connect to my POS directly, so no one on the crew re-enters an order?
- How are menu changes and limited-time offers set up, and who does the work?
- Who owns the rollout, and what does support look like six months after go-live?
- Can I measure the return in terms my CFO and COO recognize, such as labor hours saved, average ticket and crew turnover?
If a vendor cannot answer one of these clearly, hold the budget until they can.
Start every technology decision at the busiest hour
Most technology decisions start in a planning meeting or a vendor demo. Start in the busiest lane instead. Ask what that hour looks like: what your crew is juggling, and what a guest hears in the first seconds at the speaker. Then work backwards to the tool.
That frame fits every trend here, whether it is AI, labor, your POS foundation or the guest experience. The test is the same. Does it hold up when the lane is eight cars deep?
Tools that pass are worth your budget. Tools that only work in a demo are not.
See Hi Auto in your drive-thru lane
See how Hi Auto works in the drive-thru lane, from the order point to the POS: visit the Hi Auto product page.