Published June 7th, 2026 - 10:02 GMT
ALBAWABA - In an escalation of the annoyance of talking to an AI support chat bot, McDonalds is taking it to the next level with AI in drive-thrus.In a strategy called McDonalds NEXT, you’ll be giving your drive-thru orders to robots. The system called ArchIQ is being tested right now in five locations across the US, according to Restaurant Business Magazine. Apparently this comes as an attempt by McDonalds to “win back customers.”CEO Statement“Customers shouldn’t choose between hospitality or speed,” McDonalds CEO Chris Kempczinski said, who was trending a while ago for barely eating a bite of one of his own burgers in disgust;Ray Kroc used to drive around unannoced to McDonalds stores and ate few burgers a day (while counting burger wrappers in competitors trash to gauge their sales).Current McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski looks like he gonna hurl after eating new Big Arch. pic.twitter.com/pmeSCjkhrM— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) March 1, 2026 The company behind the project@McFranchisee, an X account for a McDonalds Franchise stated in a X post that Google is affiliated with the project, "Archy will not only assist drive-thru orders but act as a master brain to help managers run a better restaurant," it added. "It’s like a personal assistant that alerts you to potential bottlenecks or issues."Meet Archy IQ - no, we are not new to AOT. In fact, we have been in this AI field for about 8 years. We sold our in-house model to IBM and moved on as it wasn’t good enough for our needs.As mentioned below, I wanted to hire Google (who uses NVIDIA) to service our AOT 3 years… https://t.co/JR8QHQNyKJ pic.twitter.com/e0syxiQwre— McFranchisee (@McFranchisee) June 3, 2026 Customer feedbackMost of the comments under the X post were negative with statements like: “We all hate the system installed at Wendy's,” and another: “We hate the kiosks at McDonald's, Wendy's, and Taco Bell that we are asked to use instead of talking to a person. We will hate this too. Say goodbye to customers.”“No one wants this - we like dealing with smiling faces," another said, to which @McFranchisee replied, "We still smile at the cash and present window - this is just at the speaker."
