Pivoting and overhauling? Or just thrashing?
The Journal pointed out that a lot of companies have gotten over their skis with AI and are now “pivoting and overhauling.” You can’t blame them for looking at rote tasks with an eye toward automation, perhaps reasonably assuming that shift workers inundated with drive-through responsibilities aren’t going to be able to serve walk-in customers quite as well (and also assuming that they want to cut costs by reducing headcount). This has been a recurrent compliant about Starbucks, where workers can get overwhelmed by a surge in drive-through, remote, and in-person orders.
But you could also blame companies for thrashing around with their AI approach, attempting to jam it into any process that looks…AI-able? Don’t forget for a moment that executives such as Mathews are paid extremely high salaries to anticipate the future, and often that means joining the c-suite herd. AI investment over the past few years has been massive, and the last thing corporate leaders want is to be blamed for missing a trend that redefines their industry.
Putting the humans back into the equation
McDonald’s bailed on its drive-through AI effort, the BBC noted, after bacon wound up in ice cream and a customer was given hundreds of dollars in McNuggets by mistake. Along with Taco Bell, the titans of the drive-through are now awkwardly conceding that they might need the humans to monitor the AI after all, which is a major fail. Again, this is one of those areas where consumer interaction is designed to be minimal and pretty much all the parameters are all clearly defined. Whenever I visit a human-operated drive-through, I already feel like I’m in an algorithm.
This Taco Bell development doesn’t fill one with optimism about AI capabilities at this juncture, and it may turn out that it makes more sense to simply invest the money in workers rather than technology. If I were looking for a business school case study that could also serve as a cautionary tale about big companies that rely on customer satisfaction adopting buzzy new tech a bit too quickly, Taco Bell’s botch would be perfect. Not what you want to be dealing with when all you desire is a cheap burrito behind the wheel!
