Operations & Compliance

Drive-through and phone voice ordering

Deploy AI voice agents to take customer orders via drive-through speaker or phone. Handle standard orders autonomously and escalate complex or unclear requests to a human.

AutomationPattern-matchingCost reductionRevenue

3–8%

increase in average order value through AI upselling

Opportunity assessment

Business Impact
3

Moderate impact. Meaningful cost or revenue improvement, likely noticeable at function level but modest relative to total business scale.

Feasibility
2

Challenging. Significant technical work required. Likely needs an AI engineer or specialist vendor. Not a quick win.

Data Readiness
3

Moderate data needs. Works with data most businesses hold, but will likely need consolidation, cleaning, or reformatting before use.

Risk Exposure
3

Moderate risk. Some customer or external exposure. Errors create rework or reputational impact but are recoverable.

Change Complexity
2

High people impact. Daily workflows change materially for a number of people. Training, communication, and active change management needed.

Tooling required

Specialist AI tool

Things to consider

  • Taco Bell (Yum! Brands) deployed Omilia's voice AI across 850+ drive-thrus, automating 95%+ of orders with a 3–8% lift in average order value through consistent upselling and serving 6 additional cars per day per lane (Omilia).

  • Voice recognition accuracy in noisy environments (drive-throughs, busy kitchens) is the key technical challenge. Background noise, accents, and multiple simultaneous speakers degrade performance.

  • Customer acceptance varies by market. Some customers prefer the speed and consistency of AI ordering; others find it impersonal. Offer an easy opt-out to a human.

  • Wendy's expanded its FreshAI drive-thru voice ordering from ~100 to 500+ locations by end of 2025, demonstrating the model's scalability once accuracy thresholds are met.

  • Experiment starter: Pilot at one high-volume location for 4 weeks. Measure order accuracy, average handling time, customer complaints, and average order value versus the human-only control period. If accuracy exceeds 90% and order value increases, expand.

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