Taco Bell, Domino’s, & Sonic Are Making Fast-Food Easier

Taco Bell, Domino’s, & Sonic Are Making Fast-Food Easier

The Mexican fast food chain is partnering with the employee messaging service Slack to enable online orders through the platform. This could be the first of several ways to order a Doritos locos taco straight from your office, says Lawrence Kim, Taco Bell’s director of digital innovation.

“Obviously this could be the first of many different types of executions,” said Mr. Lawrence “A lot of these bots are scalable across different platforms.” Meaning, “TacoBot,” which is developed using artificial intelligence, could potentially be integrated with any number of messaging services in the future.

It works like this: users add “TacoBot” as a friend on Slack and can message directly with it to place orders and even pay. The feature requires users to have an account on ta.co, Taco Bell’s online and mobile ordering platform that launched in September.

tacobot
Taco bot simulation.

Inspiration for the ordering service came from Taco Bell employees’ own use of Slack, a communication tool marketed to companies as an email workaround — a way of doing everything from chatting in real time with colleagues and organizing group projects to sending GIFs and emojis.

So far, the service only allows for in-store pickup of orders, requiring companies that use it to be located near a Taco Bell store — there are more than 6,500 in the U.S. — but Kim says his team is testing a delivery option.

Taco Bell is following in other companies’ footsteps

While there are several Slack integrations that allow users to place food orders, such as one called Large that partners with companies like Instacart and Seamless to fulfill food delivery orders placed on Slack, Taco Bell appears to be the first independent restaurant to offer a similar service.

Sonic revealed on Wednesday that Coachella attendees would be able to order a milkshake designed for Instagram by using the “buy now” button on the social media platform. In fact, the #SquareShakes would only be available for purchase via Instagram. And, last year, Domino’s introduced the “tweet to order” system. With the program, customers could tweet a pizza emoji at the brand to order a fresh pie.

The company called the Twitter-based ordering system a “five-second exchange.” The emoji experiment, along with “no touch” ordering, are part of Domino’s wider digital push, as more than half of the pizza retailers now take place digitally.

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