Matt WamplerCEO & Co-Founder, ClearCOGS · CEO & Co-Founder, ClearCOGS 🔪

Drive Thru AI Isn't Ready...Yet

17 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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0:40

In this segment of the YouTube video, speaker Matt Wampler shares his experience rolling out an AI‑driven drive‑thru ordering system at Del Taco. He highlights key shortcomings observed in the field: the system’s response speed was too slow, speech recognition frequently missed or mis‑interpreted orders, and demonstrative videos often showed absurd errors such as wildly inflated totals. He notes that these glitches make the technology less reliable than a human employee, especially when the employee’s speech is unclear or delayed. Despite these limitations, Wampler believes the technology is improving and presents a genuine opportunity for future adoption, though it is not yet ready for widespread deployment across industries.

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We definitely rolled it out at Del Taco when I was there, and we found the same thing, like the speed. It was not fast enough. It was not picking everything up. There's a ton of YouTube videos out there that are just, they're laughable, where someone orders like a cheeseburger and fries and it's like, your total's $15,000. Like it still has glitches, but it's getting there. If the employee is hard to understand, if there's a delay with the employee, if it's slower with the employee, all of a sudden we're gonna go, oh, it's faster to have AI. And we're okay with it. But that's still not the way in other industries. We're still getting there on if it's possible or not. But I do think there's an opportunity.