Dairy Queen is betting that an AI chatbot can take your Blizzard order faster and more accurately than the teenager behind the window. The chain announced plans to deploy drive-thru voice AI technology to dozens of franchised locations this week, with an eventual target of installing the system at all 3,000 of its U.S. and Canadian drive-thrus, The U.S. Sun reported.
The move makes Dairy Queen one of the largest fast-food operators to commit publicly to replacing human order-takers with artificial intelligence at the drive-thru speaker box. It follows pilot tests that began at several company-owned locations earlier in 2025, run in partnership with a technology firm called Presto Phoenix.
For millions of Americans who grab lunch or dinner through a drive-thru lane every week, the shift raises a straightforward question: does the technology actually work, and what happens to the workers it displaces?
Kevin Baartman, Dairy Queen's executive vice president of information technology, told The Wall Street Journal that the AI chatbots boosted customer satisfaction scores by double-digit percentages during the pilot phase and were accurate roughly 90 percent of the time. In a Thursday press release from Presto, Baartman framed the results in upbeat terms:
"Presto has been an excellent partner and our initial results using their AI look quite promising. With Presto's AI, we can enable our staff to focus on high-value tasks that ultimately benefit our Fans, with a friendly experience, and high order accuracy."
That phrase, "focus on high-value tasks", has become the corporate standard for explaining why a machine is doing work a person used to do. Whether it means fewer hours, fewer positions, or simply different duties, Dairy Queen's announcement does not spell out.
Baartman also highlighted the system's ability to handle Dairy Queen's sprawling menu. "One of the key things we looked at was its ability to ingest our menu," he told the Journal. "It's done a good job with it."
A Presto spokesperson told Restaurant Dive that the expansion will reach at least 25 franchisees in its first phase, with broader deployment expected in the coming weeks. The company described its technology as more accurate than humans at greeting customers, delivering the right upsell pitch, and entering the correct order.
Dairy Queen is hardly alone. Wendy's is working with Google to roll out voice bots at its drive-thrus. Taco Bell, Checkers, Bojangles, and White Castle are all using voice AI in some locations. Presto's technology is also being deployed at Carl's Jr. and Hardee's.
Research from Intouch Insight found that Americans encountered AI ordering technology at 5 percent of restaurant-chain drive-thrus in 2025, up from 4 percent the year before. That number is small, but the trajectory is clear, and the chains investing in it are among the biggest names in fast food.
The technology is not flawless. Across the industry, employees had to step in and help with about 21 percent of orders placed through AI chatbots. That means roughly one in five customers still needed a human to sort things out. A 90 percent accuracy rate sounds solid in a press release, but in practice it means one out of every ten orders hits a snag, not a trivial failure rate when you are talking about thousands of transactions a day across a national chain.
The broader fast-food industry has been grappling with consumer frustration over automation and rising costs for some time. Self-order kiosks, app-only promotions, and now AI-powered drive-thru speakers have changed what it means to grab a quick meal. For older customers and those less comfortable with technology, the experience can feel impersonal at best and exclusionary at worst.
What Dairy Queen's announcement does not say is often more revealing than what it does. The press release and executive comments focus on customer experience and order accuracy. They do not address staffing levels, wage impacts, or how many fewer workers a location might need once an AI system handles the ordering window.
But the incentive structure is not hard to read. Fast-food operators face rising labor costs across the country. In California, a $20-per-hour fast-food wage mandate has already pushed chains to cut hours and raise prices. Nationally, tight labor markets and minimum-wage increases have made automation an increasingly attractive option for franchise owners who operate on thin margins.
When a company says AI will let employees "focus on high-value tasks," the unstated corollary is that the tasks those employees used to perform are now low-value enough to hand off to a machine. For the drive-thru worker whose primary job was taking orders, the math is not reassuring.
Major chains have been retooling their operations and customer-service strategies at a rapid clip. Dairy Queen's voice AI push fits squarely within that pattern, a pattern driven less by customer demand than by the relentless pressure to cut labor overhead.
Even as Dairy Queen touts its high-tech future, some of its brick-and-mortar present is less rosy. A Dairy Queen location in Bryan, Texas, shut its doors on January 27, according to KBTX-TV. The closure was tied to road construction along Highway 21, where plans unveiled in July call for transforming a 20-mile stretch by doubling the lanes from two to four. That project is expected to run through the summer of 2030.
A spokesperson told the station the company is exploring alternatives nearby but acknowledged the difficulty:
"We currently are looking at other possible properties near this location, however, with the work TEXDOT is doing, and the possible medians going down Highway 21, this is rather challenging."
The Bryan closure is unrelated to the AI rollout, but it illustrates a broader reality: running a franchise network of this size means managing disruptions on multiple fronts simultaneously. Technology upgrades grab headlines. A shuttered store in central Texas does not.
Drive-thru operations remain the financial backbone of most fast-food chains, and anything that disrupts them, whether road construction or a buggy chatbot, hits the bottom line directly. The stakes of getting the AI rollout right are not abstract. Problems at the drive-thru window have a way of compounding quickly, whether the issue is fraud, technology failures, or simple customer dissatisfaction.
Dairy Queen has not disclosed which specific locations participated in the 2025 pilot or which franchised stores will receive the technology first. The methodology behind the claimed double-digit increase in customer satisfaction scores has not been made public. And the company has not clarified whether "all 3,000 U.S. and Canadian drive-thrus" refers to every Dairy Queen location with a drive-thru or only a subset of the chain's footprint.
The restaurant industry is also watching to see how customers respond at scale. A pilot test at a handful of company-owned stores is a controlled environment. Rolling the technology out to dozens of independently operated franchises, each with different staff, menus, and local conditions, is a different proposition entirely.
The fast-food sector is navigating slowing consumer spending alongside these operational shifts. Chains that alienate customers with impersonal service or unreliable technology risk losing the very traffic they are trying to speed up.
Dairy Queen is making a bet that Americans will accept an AI voice greeting them at the speaker box. The company may be right. But when one in five AI-assisted orders still needs a human to fix, "promising" and "proven" are two very different words, and the workers whose jobs depend on the distinction deserve a clearer answer than a press release provides.