As restaurants continue to embrace artificial intelligence, it’s worth remembering that their customers probably have mixed feelings about it.
Half of Americans say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, and just 10% said they’re more excited than concerned, according to a Pew Research study published in September.
Fifty-seven percent also believe that AI represents a serious risk to society. These risks include an erosion of human skills and connections, a negative impact on the accuracy of information, and humans’ ability to control AI. There is also fear of human jobs being replaced by automation.
The tension between the rapid adoption of AI by businesses and considerable consumer uncertainty raises an important question for restaurants: How can they communicate about AI in a way that eases some of that anxiety?
That is the question being asked by MAPS Insights, a reputation management firm that uses data to help companies respond to dynamic issues like AI. MAPS was founded last year by Jasper Snyder, an expert in social listening and analytics.
“The question a lot of clients are asking now is, ‘OK, we're adopting AI, everyone is adopting AI. How do we start to talk about it?’” Snyder said in an interview.
MAPS has been studying how different industries, including fast-food chains, are presenting their use of AI, and how that is impacting their reputation in the news and on social media. The goal was to come up with a framework for “responsible AI,” with the idea that communicating about AI in a responsible way will have a positive impact for businesses in the long run.
To do this, MAPS analyzed news and social media content relating to the use of AI by large corporations across 14 sectors. It assessed the content by both volume and sentiment to come up with a ranking of companies that are leading the way on responsible AI, as well as the hallmarks of their communication strategies.
Generally, “responsible AI” companies talk about the technology in terms of governance and oversight, transparency, sustainability and customer experience. And they frame AI as a workforce enabler rather than something that is going to take people’s jobs.
Among the 20 largest U.S. quick-service chains, the leaders on responsible AI in the most recent quarter were Taco Bell, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Starbucks, MAPS found.
These leading brands focused especially on how AI relates to the customer and employee experience. This makes sense, because many of them are using AI to interact with customers in places like the drive-thru or over the phone, and those applications could appear to threaten human jobs.
For instance, Taco Bell has rolled out AI voice ordering to about 300 drive-thrus, and has framed the initiative as improving accuracy, reducing wait times, and helping employees be more productive, rather than replacing staff, according to MAPS’ analysis. Taco Bell was the top-ranked QSR in terms of responsible AI last quarter.
Domino’s has also highlighted the customer experience angle, talking about how its AI voice-ordering assistant “Dom” is designed to give customers more control over their order and better reliability. And McDonald's has presented its use of AI to improve accuracy and efficiency in its restaurants as a way to augment operations, not cut jobs.
Notably, the leaders also tend to emphasize that their AI has human backup. For instance, while testing AI in the drive-thru, KFC has made it a point to say that customers can ask to talk to a human employee at any point.
“The path to winning is the balance of combining automation with agency,” Snyder said. “So improving speed, but also keeping the option to interact with a human. … People want to be reassured by the fact that there's oversight here.”
So, while some in the AI world may view human intervention as a limitation, restaurants may want to lean into it and even encourage it.
For the most part, restaurant brands are doing a good job of communicating about AI, Snyder said: None of the 20 QSRs analyzed stood out as having a particularly negative reputation.
That could be because there has not yet been a “high-profile AI failure” in the restaurant space, or because fast-food chains are expected to be as efficient as possible, which could be limiting some negative sentiment around AI’s potential staffing impact, he said.
But also, AI in restaurants is still new and not yet as big of a target compared to other industries, like tech and finance.
“The more that shifts over time, the more we can likely see waves of negative commentary in the way we do around other issues,” Snyder said.
Indeed, MAPS’ research shows that AI adoption is still uneven around the restaurant industry. Media coverage across the top 20 chains was dominated by Starbucks (about 25% share), McDonald’s (17%) and Chipotle (12%), while large brands like Chick-fil-A, Subway and Papa Johns made barely a blip on the radar.
“It’s interesting, if you look at a lot of the leaders here, across all the sectors, a bunch of companies are saying, ‘Well, you know, should we really talk about it?’” Snyder said. “But I think that a lot of those are kind of behind the curve,” because many of the companies talking about it the most are also the most well-perceived.
“You can definitely see that there are certain companies that are really getting out ahead of this,” Snyder said.