Wendy's will start using an AI chatbot to take drive-through orders

First Snapchat, now Wendy's. No one is safe from AI.

The fast food chain will use an artificial intelligence chatbot to take drive-through orders, reports The Wall Street Journal. The new chatbot runs on Google's natural-language processing software and is trained to understand customers' orders. It will officially launch in June at a company-owned Wendy's in Columbus, Ohio.

Training a chatbot for the drive-through is more complicated than you might think. The chatbot must understand all the ways someone might order. For example, it knows that a customer might call Wendy's signature Frosty drink a milkshake and that a "JBC" is short for a junior bacon cheeseburger. To train the chatbot, Wendy's team worked with Google to customize its large language models (or LLMs) to include Wendy's specific terminology and slang.

Wendy’s Chief Executive Todd Penegor told The Wall Street Journal that the chatbot will be very conversational and indistinguishable from a regular employee. But we will believe it when we see it. It was even taught to upsell customers and how to adapt to patrons changing their orders. Roughly 80 percent of orders at Wendy's are reportedly made through the drive-through, so the chatbot has the potential to make a huge impact.

Ordering through the drive-through is already stressful enough, and now we'll have to deal with AI taking our orders, too.