McDonald's is giving artificial intelligence another shot at the drive-thru. The fast-food giant has begun testing "Archy," a voice-enabled AI ordering system that speaks English and Spanish, at five US restaurants, and the company says the system is already hitting an order accuracy rate above 90 percent in early testing.
The rollout was unveiled this week at the company's semi-annual convention in Las Vegas, where McDonald's laid out a broader corporate strategy called "McDonald's Next," according to Restaurant Business. Bloomberg first reported the company's bet on what it described as a "disembodied bilingual AI voice" for taking drive-thru orders. The news arrives at a delicate moment for the chain: Semafor reported that the AI push comes as McDonald's works to revitalize its business amid a sales slump and a plunging stock price, making automation one of the more closely watched levers in its turnaround plan.
For readers following the latest AI developments, the return of the world's largest fast-food chain to drive-thru AI is one of the clearest signs yet that the restaurant industry's automation ambitions did not end with the last round of high-profile failures.
What Archy Is and Where It Is Running
Archy is a voice AI that takes orders at the drive-thru speaker, handling conversations in both English and Spanish. McDonald's says early-test restaurants are seeing an order accuracy rate of more than 90 percent, paired with what the company describes as positive customer feedback, according to Semafor. The company has not said when or whether the test will expand beyond the initial five locations.
The stakes are considerable. Semafor noted that McDonald's serves roughly 70 million customers daily, which means even a 90 percent accuracy rate would leave around 7 million orders per day with a potential error — a customer-service challenge at a scale few AI deployments anywhere can match.
A Familiar Bet, Two Years Later
This is not McDonald's first attempt at automating the drive-thru speaker. The company was one of the earliest large chains to experiment with the technology, testing AI ordering beginning in 2021 after selling its McD Tech Labs unit to IBM and its personalization business Dynamic Yield to MasterCard, Restaurant Business recounted. That IBM partnership quietly ended in 2024 without a national expansion, with IBM shifting its drive-thru AI push to other restaurant chains after McDonald's concluded the technology was not ready for prime time.
What has changed since then is the underlying technology and the competitive picture. Smaller chains such as Hardee's, Carl's Jr. and Krystal pushed aggressively into AI order takers while McDonald's took a deliberate approach, and voice systems have improved across the industry. Drive-thru traffic remains the bulk of McDonald's US business, and an automated order taker that reliably suggestive-sells could raise average check sizes — one of the main economic arguments that keeps chains interested despite the technical headaches.
Competitors Are Hitting Walls Too
McDonald's is not the only burger chain wrestling with the technology. Burger King rolled out an AI-enabled drive-thru system earlier this year and is now rethinking its strategy after customer backlash, Semafor reported. "There are drive offs because guests don't want to talk to a bot," Chakri Somisetti, Burger King's vice president of brand technologies, told the outlet.
The industry's experiments have produced plenty of cautionary tales. Restaurant Business pointed to Taco Bell, which had to rethink aspects of its own AI ordering push after one customer famously attempted to order 18,000 cups of water through its voice AI.
Scale Is the Hard Part
The central difficulty for any drive-thru AI is the sheer variety of McDonald's footprint. The chain operates roughly 13,600 US locations, from dense urban corners of New York to rural Iowa, the Texas border and Montana, with regional dialects and ordering styles that make a single solution hard to build, Restaurant Business noted. A system that performs well at five test restaurants may behave very differently across thousands of locations with different accents, menu customizations and background noise.
Whether Archy clears that bar is the multibillion-dollar question. McDonald's has watched from the sidelines while smaller chains iterated on voice AI, and its executives evidently believe the technology has finally caught up to the brand's scale. If the five-restaurant test goes well, the company will face the far harder task of proving Archy can handle the full diversity of American drive-thru customers — in two languages — at a rate better than the humans it would partially replace.
For now, the company is asking customers for patience and investors for faith. The early numbers are promising, the competitive pressure is real, and the sales slump gives the experiment urgency. Two years after its last attempt ended quietly, McDonald's is betting that the third era of drive-thru AI will be the one that sticks.
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