Testing the Technology Isn't the Same as Testing the Experience.

A medium Coke. A 6 piece McNuggets.

That's was the whole order. This past weekend, at a McDonald's drive-thru, I had to say it eight times to an AI order taker. It was a two-lane drive-thru. Cars were backing up and I could hear customers yelling at the speaker box. At first, I thought the customers were being rude. Then I realized they weren't arguing with a person. They were arguing with a bot. The experience really was the equivalent of "REP-RE-SEN-TA-TIVE!" but worse. And when I finally pulled up to the window to pay for the order with an actual human, I asked her: "What do people think of the AI order taker?"

Her answer: "They hate it."

Customers are repeating their orders fifteen, twenty times. The lady at WINDOW 1 has told management it isn't working. And what was really grinding my gears was that she's the one taking the hit. The sighs, and the snarky, snapping comments from frustrated customers. A machine is causing this chaos, the corporate office made these decisions and a person is mopping up the mess with no script and no authority to do anything about it. The perils of a frontline worker. Talk about a person who "deserves a break today!" Side note..."You Deserve a Break Today" was Mickey D's campaign tagline in 1971.

So let's talk about innovation. I'm all for it. But this definitely was a "miss" in the design of this customer journey. Now let's dig into this not so "Happy Meal."

First, give the test its due

I've said it before and I'll say it again and again...innovation starts as a beginner idea. Everyone is a student. You test, you fail, you refine. That's the dance of innovation. A company piloting AI at the drive-thru isn't the villain here. Let's give the "Hamburglar" his due. The problem wasn't that McDonald's was testing something new. The problem was what they forgot to test around it, at least it seems.

McDonald's is no stranger to AI order taking. They ran an automated order-taker test with IBM from 2021 until they pulled the plug in July 2024 after the bot started adding nine sweet teas and bacon to ice cream, and the fails went viral on TikTok. The tech test launched in about 100 locations. Then they came back in 2025 with a tech overhaul reaching roughly 43,000 restaurants and a new AI push.

So they're not afraid to be beginners. But being a beginner with technology within the customer experience is not the same as being a beginner at the experience itself.

Here's the real "dill"...

People complain about anything new. Roll out a change, any change, and someone will hate it on principle, because they don't like change. I know that. You know that.

But change is a whole lot more acceptable when people know what to expect. A heads-up. A "here's how this works now." Resistance softens when you orient people instead of ambushing them. In this drive-thru, there was zero signage that I noticed warning me that the drive-thru was AI-enabled and a non-human would be taking my order and "here's a few tips on how to best say your order." I was completely caught off-guard.

When it comes to AI and any tech, really, we are all beginners at this. Not just businesses, but customers, too. Nobody handed us a manual on how to talk to an AI order taker. So picture the 75-year-old woman who just wants her Egg McMuffin and her coffee with cream and sugar. She pulls up, says "good morning," and the bot has no idea what to do with that. It's not listening for a greeting but it's hunting for a menu item. She doesn't know if she's talking too soft, too fast, or saying it "wrong." Is the system trained only on the exact words or does it understand the way real people actually order with the variations, the small talk, the "um, can I get a...?" And now she feels stupid in a drive-thru lane she's used for thirty years.

That's what happens when expectation-setting and communication isn't part of the combo meal. With innovation, including the customer and the team is all part of the secret sauce! You can't just slow down the ordering process at a place whose entire brand promise is fast and easy. And when the customer gets flustered and the line backs up, who's standing at the window to catch all of it? Not the bot.

A human would have asked

When the bot finally understood my Coke and McNuggets order (after eight tries), it asked if I wanted barbecue sauce. I said "no." And then it just… sent me on my way. No "would you like honey, sweet and sour, or one of the others?" No offer of the full menu I know exists. It heard one "no" and gave me my total. A teenager working that window for a week would have rattled off the options without thinking.

The bot didn't, because nobody designed it to serve but only to transact.

And when it couldn't understand me, it never said so. It never said "I didn't get that. Can you say it again?" or "try saying it like this." It said, cheerfully, something to the effect of, "If you need more time, take all the time you need" and "I'm ready to take your order" over and over again even after I shouted the order seven times already. I could sense the guy behind me was getting irritated and cars were backed up behind him. Line two wasn't looking any better.

Think about what a human would do in this situation. They might say, "sorry, could you repeat that?" They confirm, they ask a clarifying question and that's the thing the bot skipped entirely. In this case, there was no human back-up if the AI imploded on the ordering experience. And there was no escape from the line. Had I skipped completing the order and drove ahead to WINDOW 1, what would that have meant for the guy behind me?

And here's the irony that gets me. I am assuming McDonald's leadership has framed this AI push as a way to reduce the stress on store staff, to level up on operational efficiencies and order accuracy. However, a 2025 UKG study (non-specific to McDonald's) found roughly three-quarters of frontline workers report burnout and research on customer incivility shows that taking the brunt of customer frustration drives burnout and erodes the very problem-solving behavior you need most during a rollout. You can't foist a new SOP or point-of-service procedure onto your front line and leave your humans to absorb the blowback.

So how could a company think about this?

If you're rolling out something new and people are still in the loop, give your customer experience map a full "drive-thru."

1. Research the whole journey, not just the feature. Test the moment of confusion, not only the moment of success. The order that works tells you nothing. The order that breaks tells you everything.

2. Educate the customer at the point of contact. A sign. A prompt. A single line: "You're ordering with our AI assistant. Please speak naturally, and a team member is here if you need one." That one sentence changes a person's entire demeanor from caught-off guard to "I smell what you're cookin'."

3. Give your frontline a service-recovery playbook and the authority to use it. Train the objection-handling before launch: what to say, when to override the bot, how to make it right without begging a manager. A recovery script is the difference between a brand moment and brand fail.

4. Build the human off-ramp into the design. "If the system fails twice, it hands off to a person." Design the failure, because the failure with new tech, in particular, is inevitable.

5. Keep the test small and the listening loud. McDonald's or any company testing new ideas is how we make progress. New service pilots always make sense but it's whether anyone's truly listening to the "nuggets" that make or break your rollout and overall experience. And the question is how fast is that listening turning into a change. A beginner idea deserves a beginner's humility and that means you may not have thought of everything and that's where building in the listening is '"golden."

   
   

We are all wading through this AI revolution and evolution. So I am not picking on McDonald's. But my 15 minutes in the drive-thru is an example of how quickly point-of-service and customer service standards are changing and everyone is just trying to figure it out. With innovation sometime we lead, sometimes we follow and sometime we do miss a few steps.

#customerexperience #innovation #mcdonalds

Laura M. Nozicka is a speaker, strategist, qualitative market researcher, and the founder of Big Idea Tango, where she helps organizations design WITH their customers. laura@bigideatango.com