8 Times AI Fast Food Drive Thru Ordering Was A Complete Disaster

Fast food companies love to look for ways to make the cooking and ordering experiences more efficient, and many companies have decided AI is the way to go. Chances are that if you go to a major fast food restaurant and have to order through a speaker system, you'll end up talking to an AI agent rather than a human. McDonald's, Wendy's, KFC, Taco Bell, and others have been using drive-thru AI agents for a while now, and although some customers have been OK with it, many others have not. Complaints about wrong orders are legion, and there's even a trend now to yell out an excessively large order in rapid-fire speech to get a human to take over.

Many of the complaints point to simple inefficiency and an inability to get the order right the first time. Others have purposefully played with the AI to get it to stop working by ordering an enormous number of one item. However, some orders have become drive-thru disasters, with the AI system coming up with outlandish amounts and combinations that leave customers frustrated. In many cases, the experiences have been so infuriating that drivers simply left the drive thru without ordering. Read through this list of eight times AI ordering was a disaster before deciding whether your next fast-food order should be from your car or the counter inside the restaurant.

While many of the drive-thru disasters were due to technical problems, this first one was deliberate. A driver decided to order 18,000 cups of water at a Taco Bell drive-thru, only for the AI system to emit a short blip of noise and then fall silent. After a few seconds, you hear a voice that's very much human ask what the driver would like to order. There are a couple of good things to note here. One is that the AI system stopped immediately instead of processing the extreme order. As you'll see with other fails, not every system does this, much to the dismay of the people stuck in line. The other good thing is that a human took over quickly, and the driver wasn't left in the lurch. That indicated that there was some way to get past the AI system, but as you'll see in the next section, that option doesn't always kick in when it needs to.

However, Taco Bell customers may not have to worry about whether there's a human around soon. The incident with the water cups plus other AI fails have got the company rethinking about how best to use AI, and that may see some drive-thrus go back to using humans to take your order. Given the mixed reactions to the AI (online comments range from being OK with functioning AI to being creeped out at the robot voice), this change could make many customers happy.

Another notable fail for the AI at the Taco Bell drive thru wasn't deliberate, and it made the driver who was ordering actually punch his steering wheel, yell, and drive off. The driver was trying to order a large Mountain Dew, but the AI system kept asking what he'd like to drink. This happened every time he repeated the soda's name, much to the amusement of the person who was filming from the back seat; the system simply wouldn't recognize that he had ordered a drink. Unfortunately, the mishap resulted in the driver screeching away from the intercom.

Unlike the request for the water cups, no human took over as the glitch dragged on. One large Mountain Dew isn't a strange order, so whatever alert system got a human employee to respond after the water order clearly didn't work here. If Taco Bell decides to go through with removing AI from some restaurants, this would no doubt be one of the drive-thrus where the change would be very welcome. In the very least, the system needs an option that allows the customer to call for help if the company wants to keep AI at the intercom.

Taco Bell's AI might not have listened to that drink order, but it could have been worse. One McDonald's drive-thru AI was listening too well and started adding orders from other lanes. If you've been through a McDonald's drive thru, you know that many of them have more than one lane where you can state your order, and then both lanes merge into one before the payment window. One woman was ordering in a lane and said that, as she got her total amount due, a person started ordering in the next lane over. That person ordered a Diet Coke, which the original AI ordering system added to the first woman's order. When she told the system to remove the Diet Coke, the system replaced it with nine sweet iced teas. The first woman said she drove off after that.

This was only one of several complaints from customers who said they were given (and presumably charged for, if they had the patience to stay in line and go to the window) items that they hadn't ordered. While cashiers can generally fix mistaken orders, the mere fact that the mistake happened in the first place sours an entire trip. The amount of anger that the customers directed toward McDonald's convinced the company to end its use of AI in drive-thrus in June 2024. However, in March 2025, McDonald's said it would bring AI back to help with maintenance issues and order accuracy.

Another one of those McDonald's AI drive-thru disasters that involved food the customers never ordered was when one AI system went rogue and decided to add more — and more, and more, and more — chicken nuggets to an order. A video shows two young women laughing and screaming at an AI-controlled screen in a McDonald's drive thru. Initially, the order screen shows two orders of 10-piece McNuggets along with 19 more orders of 10-piece McNuggets. They briefly turn the phone away and then point the camera back at the board, which by that point had increased the number of McNugget orders.

That incident happened before McDonald's stopped using AI. In 2025, after McDonald's announced it would bring AI back to the drive-thru, one customer wrote about how his two kids decided to test the AI by ordering outlandish items. These ranged from using slang terms in place of actual menu items to speaking extremely quickly, which the AI could not process. Finally, the kids asked for 260 Chicken McNuggets, which the AI added to the order and the customer immediately canceled. The customer noted that the AI wasn't questioning the order despite the high number of nuggets that the crew would have been required to prepare.

McDonald's has been trying to use AI or automation in one form or another for a few years now, but when it switched the actual voice ordering system over to AI... well, you already know that it didn't do well. However, it wasn't just extra nuggets or drinks from other drive-thru lanes that were the problem. Sometimes, the AI added items that had nothing to do with the orders at all.

In one example, a customer grew increasingly frustrated as the AI decided her order needed condiments. She ordered water and plain ice cream (basically a caramel sundae without the caramel), only to find that the AI was adding butter pats and ketchup to the order. As she tried to explain that she only wanted water and ice cream, the AI decided to add a second caramel sundae while keeping four ketchup packets and three butter pats in the order. The customer then claimed that she was done, and it appeared that she was about to drive off. That left us wondering what happened when the next person drove up and had to deal with the incomplete order still on the screen.

McDonald's' previous AI system also seemed to really like bacon — so much so that it pushed bacon on at least two customers who were not asking for anything that had to do with bacon. In one case, a customer asked for vanilla creamer and sugar, only to be asked if they'd ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. After a couple of rounds of him asking for coffee, creamer, and sugar, the system kept asking if he'd ordered the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. Finally, he asked to cancel the coffee — only to be asked if he'd ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.

It didn't get any better for another customer who wanted vanilla cones — the AI thought the cones would be better with a side of bacon. No humans seemed to take over, and these two AI fails were among the many that eventually convinced the company to pull the system from drive-thrus. While some companies have actually made bacon ice cream in the past, something tells us this wasn't what the McDonald's customer was really aiming for.

Back when McDonald's announced it was pulling the AI system from its drive-thrus in June 2024, a spokesperson for White Castle told The New York Times that the company's AI had been doing very well, helping both employees and customers with issues like ordering speed. White Castle's AI drive-thrus did offer customers the option to call for an employee if they were having trouble with the AI, which no doubt helped make things run even more smoothly.

In August 2025, though, one AI drive-thru clearly went off the rails. A video showed an order screen give a total of $147.60 for two simple orders. The screen suddenly changed to a processing mode, only to come back with additional orders and a total of $15,400. Nothing the customer said sounded even remotely like another order, and there were no other people ordering in the background. However, the customer did ask why the total was $147, and the new order showed 100 Number Seven Combos. Looks like oversensitive AI struck again and misinterpreted "one hundred forty-seven" as "one hundred number sevens." Maybe the AI couldn't process speech that wasn't about a menu item and tried to find the closest order to match what was detected.

Another company that's been using AI in its drive-thrus is KFC in Australia, where complaints about inefficient and incorrect orders continue to accumulate. Two news reporters from separate news outlets decided to check it out and tried ordering while on camera, and neither could get the AI system to get their orders correct the first time. In July 2024, for example, one reporter asked for a particular meal, only to have the AI say a couple of times that it didn't get what he said. A human took over after a long pause.

The system apparently didn't get any better by early 2025 when another reporter tried to order combinations, ask questions about what comes with another food on the menu, and then cancel an item. The AI's responses ranged from silence, to beginning to answer but then saying it didn't understand, to simply repeating sentences. Ultimately, it told the reporter to pull forward, despite the order not being complete. As for the actual food that the reporter got, the canceled item was there, but many of the meal-combo components weren't.

The mistakes continued. Another customer reported the system adding barbecue dips instead of acknowledging an order that had a barbecue-flavor option. More dips appeared in the order, despite a request to delete them. Online reaction to the mistakes wasn't very pleasant, with some claiming that they avoid the AI and just drive up to the windows to order.