For years, the future of the restaurant arrived one touch screen at a time. You entered, tapped, customized, paid and waited for your number, while the counter—once the place where the restaurant met the customer—slowly began to resemble an unattended gate at an airport. Now comes the strange part.
Just as artificial intelligence is becoming capable of doing considerably more of the work involved in feeding us, some of America’s biggest restaurant chains are rediscovering an older technology—a human being saying hello. McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and Starbucks have all put new emphasis on hospitality and customer experience after years of pushing ordering toward kiosks, apps and automated systems. Burger King said this week that some customers in its drive-through AI trials were leaving instead of talking to a bot.
The old becomes new again, it seems. The temptation is to call this a backlash against technology…but what if what is really happening is actually the reverse? What if AI is actually making human service more valuable?
McDonald’s offers a pretty good example. This week, the company unveiled its new McDonald’s > NEXT strategy, which plans to deploy its generative-AI-enabled ArchIQ system at scale as part of an effort to improve restaurant efficiency. In the same plan, McDonald’s created a “People > NEXT” pillar designed to equip workers to deliver “a new level of hospitality,” along with a new companywide program called Make It Golden centered on food and hospitality.
In other words, the machine and the smile are arriving together. It seems like the restaurant industry’s automation experiment has exposed a distinction that was easy to miss when technology was less capable. There is restaurant work, and there is hospitality.
The first contains an enormous number of predictable tasks that computers can increasingly organize, accelerate or perform, perhaps even better than human beings. The second, though, begins exactly where predictability ends. Charan Nukathoti encountered that boundary while building Savor Scout, an AI-powered restaurant-discovery service.
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