When 260 Nuggets broke McDonald’s AI strategy

No staff, just voice recognition. One customer ended up with 260 Nuggets. Orders went viral for all the wrong reasons. Trust tanked. The project got scrapped. This wasn’t a tech failure. It was a rollout failure.

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What went wrong?

The ambition was right but the execution skipped the basics:

• No stress-testing
• No real-world edge cases
• No plan for frontline chaos

McDonald’s didn’t fail because of AI.

They failed because they deployed without a strategy audit.

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Sensai’s Audit lens!

Wrong goalposts.

They focused on cost-cutting, not experience.
Fix: align AI with customer outcomes.

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No field reality.

Accents. Noise. Chaos.
Fix: Simulate real-world mess before launch.

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No safety net.

The system had no plan B when it failed. Stress-test for ambiguity.
Fix: Add human-in-the-loop fallback.

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Bad training data.

The AI wasn’t ready for real drive-thru orders.
Fix: Use diverse, annotated, evolving datasets.

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People unprepared.

Staff didn’t know what to do when AI failed.
Fix: Train teams around the tech, not just the tech itself.

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What every company can learn?

AI isn’t plug-and-play. It’s not built in labs. It’s battle-tested in the wild. McDonald’s didn’t have a tech problem. They had a governance one. And in AI, one viral failure can cost you everything.

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SensAI’s takeaway

Your AI is only as good as your audit. Ask yourself:

• Does it work outside the lab?
• Are we tracking real business outcomes?
• Have we tested what could go wrong?

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If you’re unsure, it’s time to slow down and get clear. We help teams audit AI systems before they hit the world.

Let’s talk.

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SensAI, agentic AI dojo.