Burgers with a side of AI: Robots could soon take your order at local fast-food joints

Drive-thru visitors to Good Times Burgers & Custard locations in the Boulder Valley and Northern Colorado could soon have their order taken by a computer.

Valyant AI, a Denver-based technology startup, has launched a conversational artificial-intelligence platform for drive-thru orders at a Good Times restaurant in Denver. Valyant’s system, which is based on AI technology similar to Siri or Alexa, is expected to be installed in locations to the north over the next few months.

“Hopefully by the end of this year — and definitely by early next year — we’ll be up in Boulder and Northern Colorado,” Valyant CEO Rob Carpenter recently told BizWest.

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“Big picture, what we’re trying to do is automate customer service. As we’ve seen with manufacturing over the last 40 years, automation has increased efficiency exponentially,” he said. “Artificial intelligence has just started to evolve to the point where it can be truly useful, and we believe it will unlock similar capabilities in the customer service space.”

The system launched earlier this year, “and as far as we know, we’re the very first company to get conservational AI to market” in a fast-food setting, Carpenter said.

“We’re really proud of our system’s ability to hang with customers, answer or ask multiple questions,” he said. “The system can be interrupted, the customer can meander in their responses and the system is able to deal with it.”

Valyant considered a host of different industries to apply its technology before settling on fast-food. Retail shops were one consideration, but there are many more items on a store’s shelves than there are items in a typical fast-food restaurant. In order to ensure the technology was successful, Valyant decided to reduce the number of variables the system had to deal with.

When Valyant first rolled out the AI system it was for breakfast only. That’s because Goodtime’s breakfast menu is smaller and less complicated than the lunch and dinner menus. The system has since expanded to include all meals at the Broadway Good Times location in Denver.
Carpenter said most customers are excited to try out the AI ordering system. But those uncomfortable with the concept have the option of speaking to a human.

“We never force a customer to talk to our AI,” he said.

Prior to the system’s launch, one of Valyant’s major concerns was that a large percentage of customers would opt out of using it. That hasn’t been the case so far — fewer than 1 percent of customers choose not to use the system, Carpenter said.

“In my mind, that’s one of the biggest validations we could have asked for,” he said.

Carpenter said Valyant’s platform is successful about 95 percent of the time, but the system includes failsafes that connect customers with human employees should the AI system malfunction.

“We have people in an operations center who are watching the flow of orders in real time and can actually fix orders in real time,” Carpenter said. “And if a transaction is going off the rails, the AI system has the logic to abort itself and hand the order over to an employee, so we’re able to ensure we’re not losing the brand any revenue or customers.”

Valyant’s team is based in Denver and includes 15 full-time employees. The company plans to complete a new fundraising round in the next month or two, after which another five to 10 employees will likely be hired.

One of the criticisms often levied against automation technology is that it will cost workers their jobs. But in the current, historically tight labor market, that’s less of a concern.

Fast-food operations often struggle to fill open positions. There is a national shortage of about 800,000 workers in the fast-food industry, Carpenter said, and turnover rates for drive-thru employees are sky-high.