Chick-fil-A draws a line on AI — one part of the drive-thru will stay stubbornly human

BS BULLETIN:

Chick-fil-A CEO Andrew Cathy says the chain has no plans to replace employees taking drive-thru orders with artificial intelligence.
“We really want that hospitality to be human to human,” Cathy said.
McDonald’s and Wendy’s are among competitors experimenting with AI-powered ordering, while Chick-fil-A says technology should support — rather than replace — its customer service.

While corporate America races to figure out how many human beings can be replaced by artificial intelligence, Chick-fil-A has decided there is at least one job where the computer can wait its turn.

Taking your chicken-sandwich order.

CEO Andrew Cathy says Chick-fil-A does not plan to use AI to replace the employees who interact with customers in its drive-thru lanes, even as several major fast-food competitors move deeper into automated ordering.

“From our experience, we really want that hospitality to be human to human,” Cathy said.

“We’re not going to substitute that interaction with technology, because we feel like that hospitality is so important to create that warm environment for consumers.”

That doesn’t mean Chick-fil-A is declaring war on technology.

Quite the opposite.

The company has been experimenting with new restaurant designs and digital systems intended to move customers through faster while allowing employees to remain the human face of the business.

Its elevated drive-thru restaurant in McDonough, Georgia, for example, has four lanes running beneath an elevated kitchen.

A conveyor system can move a meal from the kitchen to an employee every six seconds, according to Chick-fil-A, while the restaurant can handle two to three times the vehicle capacity of a conventional location.

Customers can order digitally ahead of time.

Or they can do something increasingly revolutionary in 2026:

Talk to another person.

Other fast-food giants are moving in a different direction.

McDonald’s announced plans to test a voice-AI ordering system capable of handling orders in English and Spanish. Wendy’s has been deploying its Google Cloud-developed FreshAi technology, designed to automate drive-thru ordering while improving speed and accuracy.

AI companies are also aggressively marketing restaurant systems that can understand orders over engine noise, make upsell suggestions, communicate in multiple languages and hand complicated transactions over to human employees.

Chick-fil-A isn’t exactly suffering from its old-fashioned approach.

The privately held company generated approximately $23.9 billion in U.S. systemwide sales in 2025.

Cathy says the company will continue exploring new technology and considering how customers might want to receive their food in the future.

But when you pull up to the Chick-fil-A drive-thru, somebody wearing a uniform rather than residing on a server is still supposed to ask what you’d like.

MY QUICK TAKE

I like technology. Rush loved technology. Anybody who remembers the gadgets filling the EIB studio knows that.

But technology is supposed to make human beings better at what they do, not automatically eliminate the human being because somebody in a corporate strategy meeting discovered a new acronym.

Chick-fil-A seems to understand something increasingly rare in American business: efficiency and hospitality aren’t the same thing.

A computer can probably take my order faster. It may eventually take it more accurately. It can remember every possible upsell and never call in sick.

But it cannot actually be glad to see me.

And Chick-fil-A has built an enormously successful company partly around convincing customers that the person standing outside with an iPad really does care whether they get the waffle fries they ordered.

There is also a delicious irony here. After years of corporations telling us automation was the inevitable future, some big chains are rediscovering that customers actually enjoy being treated like customers instead of incoming data packets.

Chick-fil-A just decided not to forget it in the first place.

Artificial intelligence can apparently do almost anything these days.

But “my pleasure” is staying human.