Bojangles’ AI Drive-Thru Is Taking Orders at Nearly 500 Locations
If you’ve pulled up to a Bojangles recently and heard a voice that sounded a little too consistent to be a tired teenager, you may have already met Bo-Linda.
Bojangles announced this week that it’s extending its multi-year partnership with AI company Hi Auto to continue expanding Bo-Linda — the chain’s AI-powered drive-thru order taker — across its system. The platform is currently live at nearly 500 of the chain’s roughly 890 locations, with plans to add another 100 by mid-2027. At current pace, Bo-Linda will be handling drive-thru orders at well over half of all Bojangles restaurants within the next year.
The numbers behind it are hard to dismiss: Bo-Linda processes more than one million orders per week across those locations, with a reported 98% order completion rate.
How Bo-Linda Actually Works
Bo-Linda isn’t just a voice that reads back what you said. The system is built to handle the real-world messiness of a fast food drive-thru — customers who change their minds mid-order, background noise, multiple people talking from the same car, and questions about what’s available.
One of the more interesting features is how it handles dual-lane drive-thrus, which have historically been a headache for automated systems. When two lanes are feeding into the same pickup window, it’s easy for orders to get mixed up. Bo-Linda solves this by capturing an image of the vehicle that placed the order, pairing the order to the specific car so staff know which food goes with which customer when they pull to the window.
The system also makes dynamic recommendations — suggesting menu items based on factors like time of day, weather, and how long the drive-thru line is. A new upselling feature currently in development will adjust those recommendations in real time based on queue length, nudging customers toward faster-to-prepare items when traffic is heavy.
Why This Is Significant
Drive-thru AI has had a rocky few years at the industry level. Several high-profile pilots at major chains ended quietly after failing to perform reliably in live environments. McDonald’s ended its AI drive-thru pilot with IBM in 2024 after customers complained about errors. Presto Automation faced similar struggles scaling its system.
Bojangles reaching nearly 500 locations and one million weekly orders is a meaningful proof point that the technology can work at scale — not just in a controlled demo. Richard Del Valle, Bojangles’ chief information officer, put it simply: “From nearly 500 locations processing over a million orders a week, to franchisees who trust the system on their own drive-thru lines, this is what real adoption looks like.”
The extended partnership also includes a new technical integration with Global Payments’ Genius platform through an XPI connection — essentially giving Bo-Linda real-time, direct communication with the point-of-sale system. That addresses the latency problems that have historically plagued voice AI at scale, where delays between the AI taking the order and the POS receiving it caused slowdowns and errors.
What It Means for Customers
The short version: at nearly 500 Bojangles locations, the voice taking your order is AI, not a human. Whether that’s a selling point or an annoyance depends on your tolerance for automated systems — but the completion rate suggests most customers are getting through the transaction without incident.
Employees aren’t being eliminated. Bo-Linda is designed to reduce the workload on drive-thru staff by roughly a third, freeing them up to focus on food prep and the pickup window. The system is built with human override capability, so staff can step in when something goes sideways.
Hi Auto’s technology is now running at more than 1,000 restaurants total across the U.S., U.K., and Australia — including Checkers & Rally’s, Popeyes UK, and Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. Bojangles remains one of its largest single-chain deployments.
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