Title edited by me from "Yum! Brands executive pushes back against AI hate: Taco Bell drive-thru bot has helped increase employee retention by making jobs easier".
If you eat at places like Taco Bell then you are already comfortable pretending that the slop you're purchasing is food. AI is just another dab of slop (for free!) before you even order. The whole experience is about pretending so just pretend you're talking to a human. Easy peasy.
That Taco Bell has crap ingredients, and fillers in the meat, has been known for so long now. The Onion's video parodying that news coverage is 17 years old now! [1] It boggles the mind to see Taco Bell expand to new markets internationally, or hold on in markets where better fast-food brands failed and left.
It's just funny to think of somebody sitting in a Taco Bell drive thru, about to pay money to ingest fake food that will make them less healthy, and the thing they're pissed off about is that the voice coming out of the speaker is a fake. The voice isn't poisoning you, man, the 'food' is! Maybe the fake voice just makes it harder to pretend you're not doing something completely unhealthy to yourself.
I get an AI prompt when I pull up to Taco Bell. I, and everyone else I've seen there, waits for the human to respond.
I will not place orders with robots. Give me a kiosk or give me a human.
That's fair. They also state in the article that it's been helping food delivery services, and that seems like the real use-case
Title edited by me from "Yum! Brands executive pushes back against AI hate: Taco Bell drive-thru bot has helped increase employee retention by making jobs easier".
HN removed the Fortune-provided referral tag that bypasses the paywall. If necessary, use https://fortune.com/2026/10/14/yum-brands-executive-data-cen...
If you eat at places like Taco Bell then you are already comfortable pretending that the slop you're purchasing is food. AI is just another dab of slop (for free!) before you even order. The whole experience is about pretending so just pretend you're talking to a human. Easy peasy.
In what sense is Taco Bell not food?
That Taco Bell has crap ingredients, and fillers in the meat, has been known for so long now. The Onion's video parodying that news coverage is 17 years old now! [1] It boggles the mind to see Taco Bell expand to new markets internationally, or hold on in markets where better fast-food brands failed and left.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiotAmk7_IQ
It's just funny to think of somebody sitting in a Taco Bell drive thru, about to pay money to ingest fake food that will make them less healthy, and the thing they're pissed off about is that the voice coming out of the speaker is a fake. The voice isn't poisoning you, man, the 'food' is! Maybe the fake voice just makes it harder to pretend you're not doing something completely unhealthy to yourself.