QSR leaders would be hard pressed not to have noticed the surge in deployment of AI Order Taking solutions at drive-thru lanes in the past year. New pilots, scale-up of existing pilots – even press coverage and venture investment in technologies – have all been on the rise.
The reasons for this are as plain as its benefits. For QSR brands and franchise owners, AI Order Takers can improve throughput, increase average check size, and reduce labor costs. Team members working to service drive-thru lanes experience a reduction in stress and improved job satisfaction, since they can multitask less and focus more on getting the actual orders ready. This translates back to lower employee turnover and less hiring and train-up time – critical benefits given the realities of the labor market.
Most significantly, using AI to automate order taking at the drive-thru provides a number of key benefits for the guest. Ordering is easier – easier to understand what is being said, easier to be understood. Experiences become more consistent; driving through any lane of a franchisee’s or brand’s locations will yield not just the same voice but the same experience. With human workers, in addition to different voices and accents and levels of clarity, conversation flows themselves will vary. AI Order Takers can even offer opportunities to join a loyalty program.
Buying the Right Solution
Okay, so you’re convinced! This is a good idea. How, though, to find the right solution? As with any emerging technology – especially one that will need to scale to tens and hundreds of locations in a complex enterprise – making the right choice is critical, and not necessarily obvious. Not to worry! We have your back!.
Our Buyer’s Guide for QSRs leaders looking for an AI solution for their drive-thru details all the key features and technology attributes that should be considered. Features that benefit brands and franchise owners, managers and operators, as well as the team members themselves, are all detailed in the Buyer’s Guide. The Guide also includes an Evaluation Matrix at the end that can be used as a template for your research into solutions.
Let’s take a look at some of the key things a buyer should look for.
Technology: Enabling Natural Conversations in Noisy Drive-Thrus
The first consideration a buyer needs to look at is the strength of the underlying technology. Large language models have dramatically improved the ability for users to engage in natural, real-time conversations; solutions based on LLMs will benefit from the rapid evolution of the technology happening in that space. Applying that technology to the uniquely noisy environment of the drive-thru, however, is another matter entirely. The sound of a car idling while a driver talks through an open window at a microphone presents unique acoustic challenges for an AI Order Taker’s ability to process those words. Filtering signal from noise is critical here, and not something all systems do with equal ability.
Guests, moreover, don’t tend to speak at drive-thrus with the same clarity and precision they use when navigating the automated voice systems of a customer service call. It’s not uncommon for natural speech to be recursive, with guests repeating themselves several times, using different words in succession for the same item. Multiply this by 2 or 3 or more passengers in a car, all participating to varying degrees in the ordering process, and you can see how the environment really creates quite a challenge for an AI system.
The Buyer’s Guide unpacks all this. It details why successful systems must achieve both a sufficient completion rate, and an appropriate threshold of accuracy, all while operating in this noisy milieu.
Key Terms
#1 – Completion Rate – The percentage of orders sent to the POS without staff intervention. It shows how often the system completes an order from start to finish, independently. A high rate reduces labor reliance and unlocks the true value of automation.
An AI order taker must be able to complete at least 90% of orders without having to hand off to a human team member, or else it will fail to achieve sufficient returns.
#2 – Accuracy – The percentage of orders sent to the POS with every item and customization exactly right. It shows how reliably the system understands guest intent and prevents costly mistakes such as remakes, delays, and customer dissatisfaction.
Human operators typically run at about 95% accuracy, and AI Order Takers must meet or exceed this threshold.
Accuracy and Completion Rate at Scale
Maintaining the optimal level of both accuracy and completion rate is critical if an AI Order Taker is going to prove successful in meeting your aims for improved revenues and decreased costs. A fully automated system – one that uses AI exclusively, with no human supervision – may be less expensive, but will make (ultimately more costly) errors.
It is critical that buyers construct their investigation process in a way that ensures optimal accuracy and completion rate are achieved not just in pilots, but when scaled out, as well. As is true with performance metrics generally of complex systems, what a given solution can do at one scale versus 10x or 100x that size can be very different. Performance metrics advertised in vendor literature and even achieved in small pilots at one or two locations can appear adequate, but then degrade precipitously as locations are added. Achieving and sustaining both accuracy and completion rate across dozens and hundreds of locations, over time, is a major technical and operational hurdle for AI Order Taking. Vendors need to look closely at technologies, and proceed with their investigations critically.
The best approaches today are hybrid approaches, AI systems that leverage a small amount of human intervention. In such an approach, human assistance is summoned by the system automatically through the cloud, all invisible to the QSR and to the guest, in real time. This adds a bit of cost, but ultimately proves to have a higher return on investment, achieving the optimal balance of accuracy and completion rate.
The wisdom of this approach can be seen from an independent 2025 study done by Intouch Insights, who sent 120 secret shoppers to three different national QSR brands deploying conversational voice AI solutions at over 100 different drive-thru locations. InTouch found that at Wendy’s and Taco Bell, which both used entirely automated AI solutions, completion rates were only 67% and 70%, respectively. Bojangles, contrarily, using a hybrid solution, achieved a 97% completion rate.
Source: Intouch Insights, 2025 (pages 5-17)
Understanding these key metrics and how various vendors and technologies achieve them is critical in any evaluation of AI Order Taker solutions.
Enterprise-Grade Capabilities
There are other key attributes a buyer of drive-thru AI Order Taking solutions should consider when looking at different vendors’ technologies, and the Buyer’s Guide covers these as well.
Franchise Support. Large franchises often require per-location customization capabilities, and a truly enterprise-ready AI Order Taker will enable this. The ability to customize menu options or price by time of day or location, for example, is critical to large franchises. Custom prompts, flexible event support, automated onboarding processes: these are some of the features that separate truly robust systems.
Integration and Compatibility. Support for a QSR’s technology stack is key. An AI Order Taker has to work with many existing installed solutions, including POS systems, Order Confirmation Boards (OCBs), Digital Menu Boards (DMBs), and various QSR audio systems. An enterprise-grade solution must be able to integrate with all installed technologies.
Data. An AI Order Taker must provide a wide array of data features, including dashboards with different views, access control, conditional alerts, and the provision of aggregate insights in a cogent manner.
Other Vendors Considerations
Beyond the technology, its scalability, and the feature set of a solution, a prospective buyer of an AI Order Taker should look closely at the track record and credibility of the vendors behind those solutions. Are they dedicated to this industry, with deep expertise not just in the technology but in the operations of AI Order taking at drive-thrus? Who are their customers, and what do those customers say about the vendor? Do they work with a QSR’s existing technology stack? What is their vision for the future of their product? Do they offer planning, integration, and ongoing support?
Your drive-thru AI vendor partner will literally function as your voice, at the interface with your customer. Make sure this is a company you will want to work closely with, one with an excellent track record of success getting QSRs up and running.
Drive-Thru AI Order Takers: How to Evaluate Them
Drive-Thru AI Order Taking solutions offer great promise for QSR brands, franchise owners, and operators. Beyond the technology, its scalability, and its feature set – today and in the vendor’s roadmap – is the vendor themselves. Are they the right partner for you?
QSRs have a huge array of systems and processes that can be automated, and many solutions from many vendors with which to achieve this. But some systems are even more critical than others. If a piece of software powering a machine that makes apple pies goes down, you can’t sell apple pies until it is fixed. But AI Order Takers work right at the interface with the guest, car after car, order after order. They aren’t just used by your business, but are, in a very real sense, the voice of your business. Whether a guest drives away delighted or annoyed rides entirely on the performance of your AI Order Taker.
We hope our Buyer’s Guide will help you understand the technologies, enterprise capabilities, and features critical to a successful deployment at scale. You can download our Guide here.
