New Way Now: Wendy’s® serves up gen AI to reinvent drive-thru experiences with Google Cloud
63Featured in this video: Wendi Ericksen, Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer for The Wendy’s Company
Executive summary: More than 50 years after introducing the first modern drive-thru to the world, Wendy’s® is back at it, partnering with Google Cloud and Accenture to reinvent the drive-thru with generative AI. Using Vertex AI, Wendy’s created FreshAi — a gen AI assistant that automates drive-thru ordering, improving order accuracy, speed, and both crew and customer experiences. FreshAi assists the restaurant teams by taking drive-thru food orders in a friendly and efficient way, using Google’s Food Ordering AI Agent to interpret natural conversation and understand billions of order options and combinations available on Wendy’s menu. In addition, Wendy’s is using BigQuery and Looker to capture real-time sales and interaction insights across its nearly 6,000 U.S. restaurant locations, transforming its drive-thru into a powerful digital channel that helps inform business decisions. With FreshAi, Wendy’s crew members now have an extra set of hands to help, giving them more time to focus on preparing and serving Wendy’s fans their favorites as quickly and accurately as possible.
Challenge: Hungry drive-thru customers, crunched for time, need speed — not just delicious food. Wendy’s wanted to automate ordering with AI to improve drive-thru service times, but faced a massive hurdle: the complexity of its menu. With billions of possible order customization combinations, traditional AI chatbots struggled to support the diverse and dynamic nature of the menu and drive-thru ordering experiences.
Solution: Partnering with Google Cloud and Accenture, Wendy’s developed FreshAi — a gen AI assistant that automates drive-thru ordering experiences by providing restaurant teams with an extra set of hands. FreshAi assists the teams by taking drive-thru orders, using Google’s gen AI models to accurately interpret natural language and specific order requests — regardless of a customer’s dialect, accent, speech pattern, or phrasing. In addition, Wendy’s uses BigQuery and Looker to capture sales and interaction data from across its nearly 6,000 U.S. restaurant locations and gain immediate customer insights. This instant feedback loop provides a deeper understanding of its customers — from their favorite Frosty® launch to the way they build their orders — transforming its drive-thru into a powerful digital channel for driving more informed business decisions.
Results: FreshAi is helping Wendy’s reinvent the drive-thru, improving order accuracy, the speed of service, and the overall ordering experience. Crew members now have an extra set of hands to help, giving them more time to focus on building relationships with Wendy’s customers while serving up its fresh, famous food quickly and accurately.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Wendi Ericksen, Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer for The Wendy’s Company:
→ “Artificial intelligence is really making a splash in the hospitality industry in general. The quick serve industry is ripe for that because it’s all about ‘quick serve.’ We’re not just talking about these solutions, we’re actually implementing them. FreshAi is a generative AI solution that assists with food ordering in the drive-thru. It not only makes sure that we have better order accuracy — it increases our speed as well as our customer experience.”
→ “There are billions of ways to customize Wendy’s menu items, and this system had to be able to understand every unique way that order could happen and be able respond to that. The crew, working with it on a day-to-day basis, have moved from questioning it to really being excited about it and speaking about it on behalf of us. They see “her” as an extra set of hands that allows them to free up to do other tasks – the crew refer to the FreshAi assistant as Wendy.”
→ “The thing that has really changed for us is we have turned our drive-thru into a digital channel. Previously, it was three days before we would see our sales data. Now, we can understand what’s happening with the customer in real time, so we can really start to make business decisions to drive results.”
→ “We see Google Cloud as a partner in helping us with the cutting-edge technology, and Accenture being an implementation partner and helping us make sure that we’re building it for scale and have the future in mind. It’s been an extremely fruitful partnership between the three companies.”
Google Cloud products used: Vertex AI, BigQuery, Looker, Food Ordering AI Agent
Learn more:
→ Going from repeated orders to a side of AI speed, Wendy’s is reinventing the drive-thruhttps://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/wendys-generative-ai-drive-thru-reinvention-worker-freedom..
→ Transforming the Ordering Experience: Wendy’s FreshAi Updathttps://www.wendys.com/blog/wendysr-square-deal-blog/transforming-ordering-experience-wendys-freshai-update..