For the first 18 years of his life, Matt Spessard never ate at a Wendy’s restaurant.
That changed after he moved away from home to study electrical and computer engineering at the University of Oklahoma. “I got my first taste of Wendy’s and have been enjoying [it] ever since,” says Spessard, who joined Wendy’s in 2020 as vice president of restaurant technology and has served as chief information officer since February.
While his favorite Wendy’s menu item is the spicy chicken nuggets, Spessard has always craved finding fresh ways to infuse technology into restaurants. Throughout his career, he has worked in technology leadership roles at several restaurant operators, including Sonic Drive-In, Yum Brands, and Church’s Chicken.
One investment Spessard recently led is artificial-intelligence-powered voice-ordering technology at the Wendy’s drive-thru, which initially launched in a single restaurant in Columbus in 2023 but has since expanded to 36 company-operated Wendy’s locations across Ohio and Florida. Wendy’s is planning to roll out Wendy’s FreshAI to more locations throughout this year and beyond.
“Everything that we’re doing is prioritized through the lens of the customer and the crew,” says Spessard. “How do we make both of their experiences better, in parallel?”
The AI voice-ordering feature is powered by Google Cloud’s large language model, processes orders in English and Spanish, and intends to give crew members more time to prepare food. The initial test in Columbus showed that AI-enabled drive-thru service times were 22 seconds faster than the average in the region.
Taco Bell, Checkers, and Carl’s Jr. Are among the fast-food chains experimenting with drive-thru AI, a strong indication the industry sees potential productivity gains—and likely cost savings—if the technology is deployed successfully. But McDonald’s ditched the technology earlier this year and Wendy’s rollout is fairly judicious, given that the company and its franchisees operate over 7,000 restaurants globally.
Wendy’s says the approach has been thorough, taking into account customer and employee feedback, as well as accuracy and speed rates of the AI-enabled orders. As the pilot advanced, Wendy’s made tweaks to the AI’s voice-ordering tone to make it sound affable.
The AI models also had to be nimble enough to handle the complexity of Wendy’s customizable menu, limited-time offers, and other menu changes, and mismatches between what a customer may say and the Wendy’s branding. The large language model had to be savvy enough to understand when an order for a milkshake was meant to be a Wendy’s Frosty.
“That’s where I think the natural-language processing component of all of this coming together is incredibly helpful,” says Spessard.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you tell me about how the Wendy’s FreshAI concept started and what problem you were aiming to solve?
Drive-thrus are an area of the business that everyone has been trying to figure out, across the industry, to make it better for consumers. As we embarked upon our partnership with Google Cloud, we talked quite a bit about areas of innovation, and we came to the conclusion that this is a tough problem to solve and there’s a lot of opportunity to make the drive-thru opportunity better. Pretty rapidly, we got down the path of generative AI as a capability we might be able to implement to start to drive a lot of improvements across the customer and crew experiences.
What did the initial rollout look like for Wendy’s FreshAI?
We launched our first location in June 2023. Prior to that, we spent a lot of time in the lab to understand the mapping of language for an experience that’s differentiating for our customers, but also in a way that makes sense for our crew. We spent a very long time in that one location before we made a decision to expand to additional sites. We had people camp out in the dining room for thousands of hours, talking to the crew about their experience with the technology, and also having conversations with customers.
Can you talk about how you are thinking about generative AI beyond this project?
We are hyper-focused on areas that we can improve for our crew or our customers. We focus our time and energy on the front line. In addition to Wendy’s FreshAI inside the locations, there are opportunities for future capabilities—like what it may look like to implement a chatbot to translate procedures out of our restaurant operations guide and be able to tell folks what ingredients exist on a Dave’s Single [a cheeseburger], if for some reason they had forgotten it. The other areas where we are deploying AI is when you think about suggestive selling. As part of our order-taking experience, we want to make sure any products we offer the customer make sense not just with the order they’ve made but to them as a consumer generally.
McDonald’s abandoned its attempt at drive-thru AI this year. Did you learn anything from watching that experience?
We are constantly looking at how AI applications generally are performing in the industry, as well as other industries. We’re keeping an eye on all kinds of use cases out there to understand if there’s anything that we might be able to uncover that we’re not already thinking about. As we reflect on what’s happening in the competitive space, I would say we feel more and more bullish on our approach with the technology that we’ve developed and also with the partner that we have in Google Cloud.
Why did you opt to work with Google for this partnership?
Several years ago, we announced our partnership with Google, and we’ve collaborated with them on a number of fronts. They are our cloud provider, in addition to co-developing these FreshAI capabilities, and we also partner with them in the data and analytics space. The innovation that’s come out of Google has obviously been incredible over time. And I would say that Google demonstrated a lot of interest in understanding our business and how it worked.
What appetite do customers have for AI-enabled hospitality, and how will that evolve over time?
Our experience has indicated that customers are ready to participate in the automated order-taking process like the FreshAI assistant. It’s further reinforced by our recent unveiling of Spanish capabilities. This isn’t the first time people have interacted with an AI agent. People have voice assistants in their homes and on their phones. And what we have, I would say, is a much friendlier, hospitable version of a lot of those types of technologies.