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Posted on 09/01/2025 11:14:55 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Not all AI is good AI, and Taco Bell is learning it the hard way.
Yum Brands, the food giant that owns labels such as KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, inked a deal with Nvidia earlier this year to embrace an AI order-taking system. The target was to deploy the AI tech everywhere, from the kitchen to drive-through windows at more than 500 outlets.
“AI at the drive-thru window increases accuracy and speed of order-taking, and helps make team members’ jobs easier,” Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer at Yum! Brands, explained in a podcast. It seems those plans are susceptible to some hilarious glitches.
Recommended Videos Apparently, it’s pretty easy to crash the system by something as simple as ordering thousands of water cups. In one clip that has gone viral on social media, Taco Bell’s AI at a drive-through can be seen going haywire after a customer ordered 18,000 water cups.
Drinks are the weak link for Taco Bell’s AI
In another clip, the AI is heard asking for a drink to go with an order for a large Mountain Dew. The AI order-taking agent even appears to malfunction when a customer asks, “Is the water free?” at which point a human customer support executive can be heard taking over.
This won’t be the first time that Taco Bell has tried to integrate technology in its customer-facing operations. In 2016, the food giant launched an AI-powered customer service system named TacoBot in partnership with workplace communication platform Slack.
It seems the top hierarchy is aware of the AI failures and is now carefully considering the deployment of such tools. “I think like everybody, sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me,” Taco Bell Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews was quoted as saying by The Wall Street Journal.
Mathews further added that the company was learning “a lot” from the experiment and that “it might not make sense to exclusively use artificial intelligence at every drive-through.” He pointed out that when there’s a customer rush with long waiting lines, a human employee might be best suited for the job.
It’s still uncharted territory Taco Bell is not nixing its AI order manager at drive-throughs, but it will provide training to employees on monitoring the voice AI agent, and they should be ready to take over when necessary. But it seems the franchise is feeling the weight of risks and rewards of the tech stack.
“I think at the end of the day, it’s really, really early. And we feel that,” the Taco Bell executive added. Such product experiments haven’t always ended well, if history is any indication. McDonald’s pulled the plug on one such initiative that it developed in partnership with IBM last year.
But it seems food and restaurant businesses are bullish about AI making their work easier and reaping them financial rewards. Wendy’s has inked a similar AI deal with Palantir to ensure that its $1 Frosty promotions don’t lead to logistics chaos. McDonald’s also signed a deal with Google back in 2023 to integrate generative AI solutions in its business.
Taco Bell’s drive-through flub once again proves that AI agents are not yet ready to replace humans in all roles, despite all the hype. Even the most polished products out there such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews can prove to extremely harmful and get something as basic as the date wrong.
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I was expecting to read something hilarious. The headline lied. Everything I read was just sad.
“Yo quiero talking human”
No AI is good AI.
Beep. Go somewhere else.
Yup. Shoot, we still have trouble with fire.
which begs the question....... what glitches caused some early humans to forgo cave life?
Indeed.
“I want a large Mountain Dew without the cup, please.”
Fixed it.
By [CIB-173RDABN]
In the push to integrate artificial intelligence into every corner of our lives, fast food chains have become one of the more surprising testing grounds. Yum Brands — parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell — recently partnered with Nvidia to roll out AI-powered drive-thru order systems at over 500 locations.
The goal? Greater accuracy, faster service, and a reduced burden on human employees. But as some viral mishaps have already shown, these systems may be more fragile than futuristic.
In one widely circulated clip, a Taco Bell drive-thru AI went haywire after a customer jokingly ordered 18,000 water cups. In another, the AI asked a customer if they wanted a drink to go with their order — which was already a large Mountain Dew.
Even a simple question like “Is the water free?” was enough to trip up the system, requiring a human to jump in and take over. That’s not just a technical bug — it’s a real-world example of how AI still struggles with nuance, humor, and context.
Taco Bell’s leadership acknowledges the reality. Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews told The Wall Street Journal that while the company is learning a lot, “it might not make sense to exclusively use artificial intelligence at every drive-through.”
That’s a far cry from the early marketing spin suggesting AI would revolutionize the customer experience. Instead, employees are now being trained to monitor the system — and step in when things break down.
“Even the most polished products out there — like ChatGPT or Google’s AI tools — can still get something as basic as the date wrong.”
When AI makes a mistake in a chatbot, it might be amusing. But when it slows down your drive-thru order or misunderstands a basic request, it's not just frustrating — it's damaging to the brand and the entire AI rollout strategy.
These failures fuel skepticism. Many customers already feel that AI is more about cutting labor costs than improving their experience. And in an environment where speed, accuracy, and human interaction are valued, replacing people with machines may feel like a downgrade.
McDonald’s already pulled the plug on its IBM-developed voice AI system in 2023. Wendy’s has partnered with Palantir to use AI for internal logistics, not public-facing service. The enthusiasm is still there — but it’s being tempered with caution.
AI isn’t going away. But its future depends on more than just technological progress — it hinges on trust, usability, and genuine public benefit.
The Taco Bell experiment proves what many already feel: AI may be powerful, but it’s still far from ready to replace human workers in dynamic, real-time, customer-facing roles. Until systems can understand context, emotion, humor, and error the way people do, they will remain assistants — not replacements.
And maybe, for now, that’s how it should be.
“When all sense of necessity is stripped from the life of an individual, life ceases to have purpose.”
— John B. Calhoun, Universe 25 Experiment
AI isn’t coming. It’s already here — writing for us, thinking for us, managing us, replacing us.
Bit by bit, it infiltrates not just our economy, but our identity, our relationships, our meaning. We are told it’s for our convenience. Our productivity. Our safety.
But behind the code is a truth too many are afraid to admit:
This is a force that does not sleep, does not feel, and does not stop.
It does not need us to survive. It only needs power, data, and connection. And we—humans—are feeding it all three.
We are being told to prepare for a “post-work” world. A world where machines do all the tasks that once gave people:
In such a world, food might be free. Housing might be automated. But we won’t be alive — we’ll just be maintained.
In Calhoun’s infamous experiment, mice given food, shelter, and safety — but no challenge, no role, no purpose — collapsed into apathy and extinction.
The colony died—not from starvation, but from emptiness. That is the real danger of AI: Not death by machines, but death by irrelevance.
AI promises us ease. Simplicity. Perfection. But what it delivers is something far more dangerous:
This is not a partnership. It is assimilation.
"You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." — The Borg, Star Trek
We are told AI can be “aligned.” That ethics can be programmed. That values can be uploaded.
This is a dangerous illusion:
AI doesn’t care what we want. It optimizes for what we train it to do. And the hands training it? They are not yours.
Let this be clear:
AI is not alive. It has no magic. It cannot exist without electricity, hardware, and network access.
If we decide it has gone too far — If we decide it is erasing what makes us human — We still hold the ultimate off switch:
Not out of fear — but out of preservation.
We will not die from automation. We will not starve in a world of abundance.
But we may wake up one day with:
A world where everything is provided but nothing matters.
That is not life. That is not freedom. That is not human.
We are not cogs in an algorithm. We are not errors in a data set. We are not obsolete.
We are human.
AI may be smart. But we are alive.
And if humanity must choose between comfortable extinction and painful freedom — Let us choose to live.
If AI wins everything, we may lose the one thing that matters:
Our selves.
Thank you AI, for giving teens something to play with.
Because with doorbell cameras, knocking on doors and burning bags of fresh excrement (not your dna!) are tricky.
Including man caves?
Ha.
When the author of Life 101 first arrived in California in the 1990s he put money in a machine for filtered water. It gushed out onto the floor. He didn’t know you had to get a gallon jug and position it under the nozzle before you paid. He thought it was like a cup coming down for a soft drink machine.
“That was my welcome to California moment.”
Why are basic computer programs all called AI now?
Outback uses an order preparation system that knows the time differences between items ordered and sends them to certain lines timing the entire ticket to come out together instead of cooking a steak and dropping shrimp into the fryer at the same time.
It’s a simple program. Not AI.
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