Bojangles drive-thru AI stays with Hi Auto in multiyear deal
The chicken chain claims a 98% success rate on more than a million weekly orders, adds upselling that reads the queue and plans 100 more restaurants by mid-2027.
Bojangles drive-thru AI will stay with Hi Auto for several more years: the chicken chain born in Charlotte and the voice-ordering company announced a multiyear extension of their Bo-Linda partnership on 22 October. The automated order taker is already live at nearly 500 restaurants, and 100 more are planned by mid-2027.
Bojangles began scaling Bo-Linda in July 2024 and has taken it from 100 to nearly 500 locations, according to the announcement distributed on Business Wire. The chain has more than 890 company-owned and franchised restaurants in 24 states. Nation's Restaurant News describes the extension as a move to the entire system; the companies themselves give no date for the last stores.
What Bojangles drive-thru AI gives the operator
Bo-Linda never tires and always upsells; what it cannot replace is the only human voice in the lane.
According to the companies, the Bojangles drive-thru AI now handles more than one million orders a week with a “98% success rate or better”, a figure supplied by Bojangles. It is not the measure published before: in March, QSR Pro reported accuracy above 96% and order completion around 93% across nearly 500 stores. None of these numbers has been audited by an outside party.
The new feature is about money at the peak. A dynamic upsell reads the length of the queue and, when it grows, suggests items that are quicker to prepare. A new XPI connection to Global Payments' Genius point-of-sale platform is meant to cut latency, and every order is paired with a photo of the car so that staff can match orders when two lanes merge.
Richard Del Valle, Bojangles' chief information officer and chief of staff, called the system “a rare tool that improves the guest and employee experience at the same time”.
Where voice ordering has stalled elsewhere
Not every chain has stayed the course. McDonald's switched off its IBM voice-ordering test at about 100 restaurants by 26 July 2024, the Associated Press reported. According to NRN, Taco Bell slowed its rollout last year after an ordering glitch went viral, and Burger King is slowing its own test after finding that some customers dislike it.
Guests are not fully convinced either. Technomic data cited by NRN show that 23% of consumers find an AI drive-thru bot appealing and 46% find it unappealing. Hotels are testing the same idea on the phone: Aiello's voice AI now takes hotel restaurant bookings.
For the operator the arithmetic is plain: a voice that never tires, offers the fast item when the line backs up and frees a crew member for the window. What leaves the speaker post is the one human exchange in a drive-thru visit. Bojangles drive-thru AI is a bet on the first; the next 100 stores, due by mid-2027, will show whether guests miss the second.
