From robots making kebabs to FINALLY ending the McDonald's McFlurry machine malfunctions – how AI is changing fast food
DRIVING up to an ordering kiosk at a Popeyes drive-thru, you would easily think you're being served by a friendly American staff member.
But the voice you're hearing actually belongs to 'Al', the US chain's AI robot that has been programmed to take orders at all of its UK drive-thru locations.
5
Popeyes is one of several fast food giants adopting Artificial Intelligence in its operations, and many more could follow suit in the next few years.
Restaurant chains have started rolling out the technology to do a range of jobs, from figuring out what new menu items customers want, to even helping make the food in the kitchen.
If you're wondering whether robots might be serving you up your next cheeseburger or kebab, these are all the fast-food chains joining the AI revolution.
German Doner Kebab
German Doner Kebab is planning on replacing humans with robots to slice up its doner meat at all its restaurants within the next year.
The major kebab chain, which has almost 150 sites in the UK, is currently trialling robotic meat shavers in a handful of its restaurants.
The firm's boss Simon Wallis previously told The Sun the robots actually do a better job than humans, as they "shave the meat more consistently and improve productivity".
McDonald's
5
The world's most famous fast food chain has some big plans to roll out AI, and is even using the technology to prevent its McFlurry machines from breaking down.
McDonald's announced earlier this year that it wants to introduce the technology to over 40,000 restaurants around the world to help improve its customer experience.
Sensors are being added to its fryers and ice-cream machines to help staff predict when they might break down and get them serviced more quickly - which could see an end to the running joke among McDonald's fans that the McFlurry machine is never working.
Cameras could also be installed in restaurants, which would use AI facial recognition technology to make sure customers are given the right orders.
It's not the first time McDonald's has tried out AI in its restaurants.
The chain ended up removing AI ordering from its US drive-thrus last year after videos of the robots' order blunders went viral, from bacon-topped ice cream to customers being served hundreds of dollars' worth of chicken nuggets.
Popeyes
Popeyes was the first fast food chain to bring AI ordering to UK drive-thrus, rolling it out to its five drive-thru locations last summer.
Orders are taken by a robot with a friendly American accent dubbed 'Al', named after the firm's founder Al Copeland, which is trained to understand accents from all around the UK.
Al can answer questions from customers such as "what sauces are available?", and is even trained to handle customers changing their mind halfway through their order.
It can even recommend meal combos, and explain what's in every Popeyes item.
Unlike's McDonald's drive-thru robot mishap, Popeyes said the technology was 97% accurate after a trial at its Northampton drive-thru, with no customer complaints.
The fried chicken chain is also looking at other ways it can use AI, including to predict how many orders it expects to have so it can improve efficiency.
Domino's
5
Also hopping on the AI bandwagon, Domino's is planning on using the technology to figure out what customers want next, from new pizza flavours to improvements to its service.
The pizza chain plans to use cutting-edge Generative AI technology to analyse what its customers are saying about Domino's on social media platform Reddit.
It also wants to expand the rollout so it can see what customers are saying on other social media platforms.
However, the plans are only for the US, and Domino's said it's not currently planning to implement the technology for UK customers.
Starbucks
5
Starbucks has recently introduced a virtual AI assistant to help its baristas while they take orders and make coffees.
Employees can use in-store iPads to ask the assistant questions, such as what ingredients are in a new drink on the menu, and it will answer them immediately.
Starbucks said the technology would give its staff more time to focus on crafting beverages and connecting with customers, instead of flipping through manuals to search for answers.
The scheme, called Green Dot Assist, is being piloted across 35 of its US stores.
.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
32 minutes ago
- BBC News
Security fears force council to remove iPads from schools
More than 2,000 iPads are to be removed from school classrooms in Argyll & Bute to avoid the devices becoming a security risk.A report for the local council stated the devices must be taken out of use by October 2026 before they develop "critical security vulnerabilities".Just under 1,000 devices have already been removed this year because of software being out of date and no longer compatible with Apple's security releases. Councillors agreed to provide more than £1.5m of funding over a five year period to expand the existing computer rolling replacement programme (CRRP) to also include iPads and Chrome books. CRRP previously did not cover iPads or Chrome books, meaning there was no funding available to replace iPads when they became director Douglas Hendry said: " Due to a lack of current device replacement strategies at school level, schools can face challenges when outdated equipment, which can no longer be supported, is removed from the network due to becoming obsolete or posing a security risk to the network."In April 2025, the ICT security team advised of the immediate removal of 970 iPads running Apple iPad software below version 17 from the school network due to critical security vulnerabilities."Another 399 iPads are to be removed by October 2025, with a further 904 needing replaced by October Hatton, an analyst with the firm CCS Insight, said the speed of change with modern technology could create regular issues for told BBC Scotland News: "This is certainly a concern in some areas of tech. If we look at laptops, for example, the imminent end of life for laptops running Windows 10 will cause major problems for many organizations yet to upgrade to hardware capable of running Windows 11. "We would expect quite a few cybersecurity concerns to arise over the coming years, for organizations and consumers, if people don't upgrade their devices."Councillor Audrey Forrest, policy lead for education with the local authority, said the CRRP expansion would "ensure that our children and young people have the best possible learning opportunities and gain essential knowledge and skills to help them thrive."
Telegraph
34 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Britain has just spent £1bn on new F-35s. Were we right to do so?
For a Labour government keen to showcase its defence credentials to the world – and particularly Donald Trump – it was the perfect party piece. Ahead of this week's Nato summit in the Hague, Sir Keir Starmer announced the purchase of 12 new F-35A fighter jets, ordered from the United States at a cost of nearly £1 billion. Armed with state-of-the art technology and radar jammers, the so-called 'flying computer' can operate almost invisible to enemy eyes: as its maker Lockheed Martin boasts, 'it is built to conduct missions others can't'. More importantly, it can carry bombs that others can't. The F-35A will enable Britain to carry US B61s – tactical nuclear weapons that could be deployed on a battlefield in the event of a war with Russia. The idea is to widen Britain's range of nuclear response options, which currently rest only in the much bigger strategic missiles carried on its Trident submarine fleet. In nuclear weapons terms, that is the difference between a scalpel and a sledgehammer – and while the purchase has horrified disarmament campaigners, Sir Keir insists it is a necessary evil. 'In an era of radical uncertainty, we can no longer take peace for granted,' he declared. What has also not been taken for granted, however, is the F-35's complete reliability. For despite being billed as America's foremost combat jet, critics say it has suffered more than its fair share of glitches during its 19-year flying history. In 2019, the military magazine Defense News revealed that Pentagon chiefs had identified precisely 857 'deficiencies' in the aircraft's design, including seven that were potentially 'critical'. Most have since been dealt with, but to this day the F-35 programme remains dogged by technical hitches and concerns about reliability and maintenance. Britain has been a major customer of the F-35s, and already owns 48 F-35Bs – a variation on the F-35A that also has vertical take-off and landing capabilities, making it suitable for use on aircraft carriers. Worldwide, however, at least a dozen F-35s have been involved in accidents or serious technical failures since 2018. Sometimes the cause has been malfunctioning headsets or software failures; on other occasions pilots have simply struggled with the complex technology. In January, an F-35A fighter jet crashed during a training session at an Air Force base in Alaska after an in-flight malfunction, forcing the pilot to eject. Three years ago, a South Korean Air Force F-35A made a belly landing after a bird strike and a landing gear malfunction. Just this week, it was revealed that a British F-35B serving with an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean has been stranded on the Indian mainland for more than 10 days after monsoon rains forced it to make an emergency landing. A technical issue with the craft was reportedly identified after it landed, and a British Merlin helicopter from the aircraft carrier flew technicians in to try to fix the suspected hydraulic failure. But like a fancy sports car that can only be repaired by authorised dealers, the F-35 was deemed in need of a team of specialists from the UK. Meanwhile, Royal Navy chiefs are said to have turned down an offer by the Indians to move the jet out of the rain and into a hangar, for fear they might take a sneaky peak at its sensitive technologies. Problems with software updates have meant that hundreds of the planes have at times lain in hangars in the US, hindering ongoing roll-out programmes to Europe's other Nato players. Like much high-tech Pentagon equipment – especially anything nuclear-capable – the US military is cagey about the exact nature of the issues. But outsiders have not been shy in airing criticisms, among them aviation expert Bill Sweetman, a Hampshire-born former editor for Janes (a global open-source intelligence company), who now lives in the US. While Lockheed Martin hails its product as 'stealthy, speedy and the future of air dominance across the world,' Sweetman is rather less complimentary. In a book published last year, detailing the programme's problems and vast cost overruns, he famously dubbed the F-35 a ' trillion-dollar trainwreck '. Others – including a former acting defence secretary under Trump – have been equally damning, dismissing it as a 'rathole' and 'f----d up.' Sweetman paints a picture of a vast, outdated flight development programme, which began in the late 1990s when computer technology was far less developed than it is now, and has been playing catch-up ever since. As a result, he argues, the F-35 is rather like a clunky late-1990s laptop onto which lots of additional hard-drives and software have had to be awkwardly grafted. 'Operating a stealth aircraft [one designed to be invisible to radar] is always a unique challenge, in that you are also trying to minimise all the electronic signals that the plane might emit,' he says. 'But a big problem has been the design of the electronics, as how one did these things 25 years ago is very different to how they might be done today. By the late 2010s, for example, they were already running out of memory for the plane's computers, so they had to install first one new computer control system, and then another. That's very complicated and also affects the jet's avionics – how it flies. It might have been better to have had a design that kept the avionics separate from the control systems.' Lockheed Martin disputes that assessment, and compares the updates to 'how an iPhone receives a software update on a base operating system'. John Neilson, the firm's director of international media and corporate affairs, says: 'We continue to release iterations of software that will further enhance combat capabilities, operational effectiveness and readiness of the aircraft.' More than 1,000 F-35s have already been produced, several hundred of which are already in use by Nato allies or due for delivery in coming years. Sweetman believes that the programme, like many large-scale defence contracts, ended up being simply too big to abandon, and that 'every failed fix made matters worse'. Last year, members of the United States House Committee on Armed Services even argued for scaling back procurement of the planes until the problems were ironed out for good. The programme, however, is already seriously behind schedule, making matters even worse. 'They were all supposed to be delivered before 2030,' Sweetman says. 'Now that target is more like 2054.' Greg Bagwell, a retired air marshal and distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, says the issues extend beyond 'teething problems'. 'The F-35 is a big and long programme, with some way yet still to go,' he says. 'And while you can excuse any teething problems… there are clearly issues.' Bagwell likens the F-35 to a thoroughbred racehorse or Formula One racing car, arguing that because of its high-performance capabilities, it was always likely to suffer occasional technical hiccups. 'But if you look at the total number of flying hours that have already been put in, the number of serious issues has been pretty low,' he adds. The plane was in action over Iran recently during the US-Israeli bombing raids, with no performance issues or combat losses. 'There is some truth to the criticisms of people like Bill Sweetman, but based on exercises and operations we've seen so far, the F-35 is well above anything else we have,' says Bagwell. Other defenders of the plane, which took part in its first combat missions against Isis in Iraq in 2019, agree that despite its problems, it is still currently peerless. Its 360-degree vision gives pilots unrivalled situational awareness, and it also has formidable electronic warfare capabilities that can overwhelm enemy air defences. As one writer put it in an article last year for the magazine European Security & Defence: 'If the task is to go and drop a pair of small precision-guided missiles through someone's roof, and return home safely – probably undetected, and certainly unmolested – then there is no better aircraft to achieve that than an F-35.' Defence analysts also point out that glitches are routine with any high-performance aircraft, and that most of the more serious ones with the F-35 – such as problems with cockpit pressure leading to pilots suffering sinus pain – have now been ironed out. The debate over the F-35s' effectiveness, however, comes amid a wider discussion about whether the military should continue investing in manned aircraft and ' Top Gun ' pilots at all. With drones now effectively dominating the battlefield in Ukraine, many wonder if the West would be better off focusing purely on unmanned planes, controlled in turn by AI technology. Among those who believe so is American entrepreneur Elon Musk, who made his feelings known on social media last year when posting a video of a drone swarm. 'Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35,' he said, adding: 'Crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs. A reusable drone can do so without all the overhead of a human pilot.' Even Sweetman, however, points out that no drones currently have anything like the speed, range or weapons-carrying ability that a fighter jet has. And as the US bombing raid on Iran's nuclear facilities proved earlier this week, manned flights still have their uses. In an interview with The Telegraph last year, Paul Livingston, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin's UK arm, insisted the F-35's capabilities were still 'beyond anything else out there'. 'Before the F-35, if I was going to fly a mission into a peer nation's territory to strike against a well-protected target, I would need a minimum of 16 aircraft,' he said. 'You would have jamming aircraft – which, by the way, says, 'Hello, we're coming' – then you'd send in suppression of enemy air defence aircraft, because you'd have to kill the radars off, then you'd send fast strike aircraft in. 'I can now do that same mission with four F-35s and no support. And they don't need protection afterwards, because they can fight their way out.'
Sky News
35 minutes ago
- Sky News
ONS secures extra cash to restore confidence in UK's economic statistics
Why you can trust Sky News A further £10m is to be spent on fixing shortfalls in the core numbers produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) amid a continuing lack of confidence in their accuracy. The body is tasked with producing official figures covering key areas of the economy and societal trends. It has faced particular criticism over the quality of its Labour Force Survey (LFS) - used to calculate employment figures. The Bank of England, which needs accurate readings for its rate-setting committee to make informed judgements, is among institutions to have expressed frustration with the numbers since the COVID pandemic. The problems at the ONS are not all financial. The Newport-based body's challenges include in areas such as the LFS. It hopes to have made improvements by spring next year. That will be of little comfort to the Bank which needs to know how much inflationary pressure is lingering in the jobs market, through things like wage growth, as it sets interest rates. The ONS confirmed that plans were being enacted to "urgently" improve the quality of its work in two areas - that covering the economy and population and the other its household and business data. The extra cash, to be spent over two years, is to fund the recruitment of up to 150 more economic data specialists, it said in a statement. The ONS also said that the UK Statistics Authority and Cabinet Office had agreed with a recommendation to temporarily separate the role of national statistician from that of ONS permanent secretary. This was in order to provide a greater focus on improving the quality of its core statistics. The ONS did not rule out revisions to past data in the months ahead. Acting director general for economic statistics, Grant Fitzner, said: "The ONS's Plan for Economic Statistics aims to restore confidence and improve the quality of our core statistics. "It is open about where things stand today and where we need to do better - and forms a crucial part of our response to the recent Office for Statistics Regulation review into economic statistics. "The Survey Improvement and Enhancement Plan does the same for our household and business surveys."
