Andrew Charles, research analyst at TD Cowen
Andrew Charles, a senior restaurant analyst at TD Cowen, has seen the future of drive-thru. Rather, he’s heard it.
“Voice AI is showing a check lift where it is being used today,” he told the audience at the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference. “The reason is simple: as human beings, we hate rejection. So if you’re a cashier and you’re asking, ‘Would you like fries with that?’ After a while you’re going to stop asking because people are not taking you up on that. But the machine won’t mind. It’s going to ask every time. And it learns. Like Amazon, it can say, OK, customers who ordered this, also ordered that.”
Charles believes that Voice AI has the potential to take industry digital orders from around 16 percent of transactions to 30 to 40 percent.
“We’re reaching a tipping point where this will become mainstream over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said, noting labor savings as an attractive outcome. “We are seeing restaurant inflation normalizing at around 4.3 percent but normal still isn’t easy.”
The potential implications are widespread, touching on the performance of POS and loyalty programs as well as payments. Speed should improve. Instead of a car rolling up to a drive-thru and hearing, “One moment please,” the driver will instantly be able to begin the order.
And there’s the human element. Enact a Voice AI solution and chances are good you will have happier employees.
“The bottleneck right now for many operators is the person in the front of the drive-thru,” he said. “The fact that they’re tendering payments, taking orders, selling orders, is a lot. Adding Voice AI will make their jobs easier and you can redeploy their time.”
Order accuracy is still coming together, however. Charles estimates that right now it’s at 85 percent.
“You’re never going to get 100 percent. There’s dialects of consumers to take into account. And there are consumers who just prefer to speak with a human. But as more brands adopt Voice AI, more education will take place in the marketplace.”
The Restaurant Finance & Development Conference, presented by the Restaurant Finance Monitor, Franchise Times and Food On Demand, was held November 11-13 at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas.
