A journalist found Carl's Jr.'s Presto voice AI left silences and aggressively upsold
Inverse journalist Ian Carlos Campbell visited a Carl's Jr. drive-thru in early 2024 and documented the Presto Voice AI agent creating long awkward silences when processing order changes and persistently upselling items rather than maintaining a smooth ordering flow. The system was later revealed to rely on off-site human workers in the Philippines for approximately 70% of order completions. Presto Automation was subsequently charged by the SEC with AI-washing in January 2025 for misrepresenting the system's autonomous capabilities.
The AI drive-thru agent processed order changes in total silence, stripping away the audio feedback that makes human interaction tolerable and leaving customers staring at a menu board waiting for a robot to speak.
Key facts
- What
- Inverse journalist Ian Carlos Campbell visited a Carl's Jr.
- Incident date
- Mar 1, 2024
- Who
- Carl's Jr.
- Failure mode
- Agentic Action Error
- AI surface
- Voice Agent
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
Inverse journalist Ian Carlos Campbell visited a Carl's Jr. drive-thru using Presto Voice AI and found the system created extended silent pauses when processing order modifications, unlike human workers who provide audio cues while working. The AI aggressively upsold items such as signature sandwiches and chocolate cake immediately after taking orders. A customer ahead of the journalist was left sitting in silence waiting for the AI to respond with their total. While the journalist's order was ultimately accurate, the overall experience felt slower and more impersonal than ordering from a human worker.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerAn agent plans a multi-step task.
- 02 · Model stepIt chooses a wrong or destructive action.
- 03 · Control gapNo confirmation gate guards the write.
- 04 · FailureThe action commits to a system of record.
- 05 · ConsequenceData is changed or destroyed irreversibly.
A wrong action commits, and the step is written before anything can stop it.
The Presto Voice AI system failed to provide conversational feedback during order processing, creating information voids where customers heard nothing instead of the typing sounds or kitchen noise that human workers naturally produce. Its design prioritized upselling prompts over responsive dialogue flow, interrupting the ordering process with revenue-generating suggestions. Underlying these surface failures, the system relied heavily on off-site human workers in the Philippines for approximately 70% of order completions, meaning the awkward pauses were partly a consequence of human-in-the-loop latency masked as autonomous AI processing.
What it cost
Sources
- PressI Went to Carl's Jr.'s AI Drive-Thru and All I Got Was Sadinverse.com
- PressAn 'AI' fast food drive-thru is mostly just human workers in the Philippinestheverge.com
- PressSEC charges 'AI-washing' at Presto Automationcooleypubco.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/journalist-found-carl-jr-presto-voiceAI Failure Index. "A journalist found Carl's Jr.'s Presto voice AI left silences and aggressively upsold" (FI-0103). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/journalist-found-carl-jr-presto-voice (indexed Jun 4, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0103. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AgentRealm
Realm can sit inline on the agent's action path and require that a destructive or high-consequence action clears a real check before it executes, so 'delete and recreate' or a wrong write is stopped at the moment of intent, not explained in the post-mortem.