Dairy Queen expands voice AI drive-thru ordering to 25 states, Canada

Dairy Queen moved voice AI out of test mode and into real drive-thrus, saying the system will expand from corporate stores to at least 25 franchisees across more than 25 states and Canadian provinces. The chain said it ultimately wants the technology in substantially all 3,000 of its U.S. and Canadian drive-thrus, a scale that turns ordering automation into a day-to-day labor issue, not a side experiment.

The first wave was expected over the next few weeks to catch ice cream season, when drive-thru traffic tends to spike and mistakes are expensive. Dairy Queen said the pilot improved order accuracy and created a friendlier experience, while Kevin Baartman, the company’s executive vice president of IT, said the goal was to let staff focus on higher-value work without losing speed or hospitality. Presto CEO Krishna Gupta said the company had worked closely with Dairy Queen on complex menu integrations, friendly voices and a smoother handoff between the AI and a person.

That matters because Dairy Queen is not an easy menu to automate. The chain has said it offers more than 1 million possible combinations, yet it still sees voice AI as workable at scale. For crews, the near-term change is likely to show up first at the front of the store: fewer interruptions at the speaker, less pressure on the cashier or shift lead to catch every custom order, and more demand for workers who can solve exceptions fast when the system misses something.

The bigger point for Pizza Hut workers is that this same logic is already moving through Yum! Brands’ own playbook. Yum! said on March 18, 2025 that it was partnering with NVIDIA to speed up AI development across its restaurant system, where it operates more than 61,000 restaurants worldwide. Yum! said it had already started testing multiple AI tools in select Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations in the United States, with an early focus on voice AI for order taking, computer vision for drive-thru speed and labor management, and AI-driven intelligence for managers.

Yum! also said digital sales made up more than half of revenue in 2025, up from 19% in 2019. That is the backdrop for Pizza Hut crews trying to understand what comes next. If more of the order flow is automated, the value of the people left inside the restaurant rises in the moments automation cannot handle cleanly: rushes, custom orders, quality checks and guest recovery. Dairy Queen’s rollout suggests those changes are no longer hypothetical. They are becoming part of normal restaurant operations.