Employees at hundreds of Bojangles restaurants will be getting a new colleague soon. Her name is Bo-Linda, and she’s a robot.
Bo-Linda, an AI voice system made by Hi Auto, is designed to take orders in the drive-thru. She is already in place at about 200 of Bojangles’ more than 800 locations, and is coming aboard at more every day. Both corporate and franchise stores are included in the rollout, which will make Bojangles one of the largest users of drive-thru AI in the country.
Bo-Linda has had a number of benefits for the growing chicken and biscuit chain. She cuts a drive-thru employee’s workload by a third, allowing them to spend more time preparing orders, taking payments and interacting with customers at the window. She can also upsell, asking customers if they’d like to make their meal a combo or upgrade to a larger size. And she is highly accurate, completing more than 95% of orders correctly without human intervention.
She has become so integral to the restaurant’s operations that workers now think of her as another employee, said Bojangles CIO Richard Del Valle. “If we told the team we were taking it out, we think they’d be pretty unhappy with us,” he said.
The Charlotte-based brand is one of a growing number of fast-food chains to use AI to take drive-thru orders. While the technology has progressed in fits and starts at other places, Bojangles is speeding ahead after proving that it can work.
“I’m not surprised that people have struggled with this,” Del Valle said. “The tech works great. The tricky bit is making sure that you can react to anything that comes out of that guest’s mouth.”
The first time Bojangles tested Bo-Linda live in a restaurant, she was quickly thrown for a loop when a customer ordered a breakfast biscuit sandwich but asked for the biscuit to be hollowed out.
In the past, a human worker would have typed that instruction into the POS. But with Bo-Linda, novel scenarios have to be programmed for them to be understood.
During the pilot phase, the Bojangles team collected about 300 new price lookups to incorporate into the system. And every time it enters a new market with Bo-Linda, the chain posts a staffer in the restaurant to flag any unusual requests.
If Bo-Linda runs into trouble, she will ask an employee in the restaurant for help. Managers and drive-thru workers listen to every transaction via headset and can pick up where the AI left off. Only about 3% of orders get diverted to an employee, Del Valle said.
Bojangles became interested in drive-thru AI coming out of the pandemic, when many restaurants found themselves understaffed. But as it began to learn more about the technology, the use case shifted from filling positions to helping employees be better at their jobs.
Today, Bojangles’ staffing levels are “very close” to where they were pre-pandemic, Del Valle said. Bo-Linda helps cover some gaps, but more importantly, she takes a load off the rest of the crew.
“To me, the biggest thing, or the biggest surprise, has been the improvement of the employee experience,” Del Valle said. “If we can find ways to make their lives easier, which will then translate to a superior guest experience, that’s a home run for us.”
Customers, meanwhile, have not had all that much to say about Bo-Linda, good or bad, which Del Valle views as a positive sign. He noted that the chain’s friendliness scores have not changed since adding the system, and have even improved in some cases, suggesting that at the very least, the guest experience has remained consistent.
Del Valle said voice AI is one of the biggest game-changers he’s seen in a long time, and the most impactful thing he has personally worked on in his nearly four decades in the industry.
“There’s technology here, but there’s also art, there’s interpersonal considerations, there’s knowing your guest and how they interact with the brand,” he said. “If you were to ask me, ‘After all this time, what are you most proud of?’ I can easily say this.”
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.