The planets are aligning around voice artificial intelligence (AI) as everyday business use cases begin to build, perhaps nowhere more so than at the restaurant drive-thru.
The synergies are clear, as evidenced by the recent pact between ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Presto, the voice AI used by quick-service restaurants (QSRs) and fast-food chains like Applebee’s, McDonald’s and other top brands that have deployed AI for a drive-thru experience that’s good for business.
In a conversation with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Presto interim CEO Krishna Gupta said that voice AI in the drive-thru arena “is evolving quickly” and in so doing, offering restaurant chains beset by labor shortages and classic drive-thru snags a better way to work.
Presto Voice is the company’s proprietary voice AI, and combined with ChatGPT, the company believes order sizes will increase, labor issues will be eased, and restaurants will see an improvement in customer experience.
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“With OpenAI specifically and large language models in particular, our job is to integrate that into our existing product workflow and make things faster, more personalized, and provide capabilities that frankly weren’t there before,” he said. “All those things matter in the drive-thru.”
Gupta said the ChatGPT integration also matters because “as the voice becomes increasingly human-like, you can respond to edge cases, and you can do that more quickly because the speed of service matters so much to customers.”
Asked if Presto chose ChatGPT to improve order accuracy or experience, Gupta said, “It’s both. Higher accuracy is a goal of our team in general, and we’re at a very high degree of accuracy.” That means more happy customers who don’t drive off only to find their fries missing, but also “allows the restaurant to either replace a full-time employee or have him or her focus on higher-value things.”
Edge cases that AI can’t resolve, like requests for items not on the menu, can be handled by humans without losing business or lowering customer satisfaction. Its other superpower is consistent upsell, which can drive order values up 6% on average, he said.
Gupta likened it to gamers who know the right combination of buttons to press on a controller to achieve certain outcomes: “Upsell is sort of like that,” he said. “You have to figure out what is the perfect combination of buttons, being the main order, and then the side, and then the drinks, the dessert and whatever, and the size of them.”
He added, “The AI is driving towards the perfect upsell. The upsell happening today is far from the perfect upsell. A lot of times it never happens because the human gets tired, or they forget. The AI never gets tired, the AI never forgets,” and it can learn successful combinations.
While upselling is important, Gupta said, “What’s driving this is more on the efficiency side. That could be either from the labor automation side or the upsell side, where for the same cost of delivery, you’re getting more revenue. It’s driving more dollars to your margin. Everyone’s focused on their margin. That’s what makes these restaurant stocks go up.”
While not new to the fast-food space, voice AI is not common yet, although bringing in large language models like ChatGPT could change that. It’s a sea change happening before our eyes.
“One of the best things that ChatGPT has done for any applications like ours is to dramatically increase the general awareness of the power of AI,” he said. “It’s like, maybe this thing that Presto’s talking about is not sci-fi, it’s something real, and it’s OK for us to implement this.”
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Of the vanishing reluctance on the part of operators he added, “I don’t want to call it technophobia, but this sort of, ‘Is AI good or not, is it real or not,’ that barrier, I think, is very quickly dissipating. I would say we’re now at a point where most chains are figuring out how to adopt this, whom to work with, and how quickly they’re going to move on it.”
More important than the qualities of a voice AI is listening to the voice of the customer, and Gupta is focusing there.
“There’s been an evolution in the human quality of the voice, which is rapidly improving,” he said. “As somebody who also runs a venture capital firm, I’m aware of all the new companies coming out that are trying to clone the humanness of the voice. We can now probably do things like emulate Ben Affleck’s voice for Dunkin’, which would, I think, be a very powerful thing.”
Presto will be among the first to find out how powerful new applications of voice AI can be, with its impressive roster of clients, who, he said, want to “track and monitor how these deployments are going nationwide across franchisees in some real-time way.”
“That’s where I would say our enterprise readiness and the fact that we have worked at a nationwide scale with franchises around the country comes in, because we understand how to implement enterprise-grade technology that powers the whole deployment behind the scenes.”
Adoption by chains will vary depending on how they like to partner with tech providers, sometimes choosing one vendor and sometimes testing several. That voice AI will play a bigger role at the drive-thru is seen as a foregone conclusion by those closest to the process.
Gupta said, “Do you think a human will be taking your order in the drive-thru two years, three years from now? Why would they? So that inevitability, I think, drives decision-making, which happens for certain products and certain industries, and I think [voice AI] is one of them.”
Not only this, but use of the tech will expand rapidly from fast-food to QSRs in what he sees as an inevitability given the pressures chains face in a changing landscape.
“People are generally ordering more delivery than they did before the pandemic, even though in-room dining has bounced back in a very meaningful way,” he said.
“What comes into this is that the drive-thru specifically has seen a big rise. I think every QSR chain now looks at the drive-thru as an interesting and important part of its strategy. They’re all investing in figuring out what is the future of their drive-thru. That’s not a temporary sort of situation.”
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