Hungry for Learning: Wendy’s Will Croushorn

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
How can AI remove barriers and make more seamless, enjoyable customer experiences possible? Find out on today's episode.

**Will Croushorn** (0:11)
I'm Will Croushorn from Wendy's and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:16)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 12 seasons of podcast episodes. On each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Hi, listeners. Thanks everyone for joining us again. Our guest today is Will Croushorn, product manager at Wendy's. Most of you are familiar with Wendy's. It's an international fast food restaurant. Will has a fascinating background, which I'm hoping we have time to get into. At Wendy's, he's been involved with the FreshAi initiative, which is using AI agents to take drive-through orders. Will, great to have you on the podcast.

**Will Croushorn** (1:20)
Thank you, Hussein. I'm really excited to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:23)
How did you get interested in artificial intelligence?

**Will Croushorn** (1:25)
I was working for a company in Nashville. I'm, just by nature, a pretty curious human. And I remember the first time that I typed into ChatGPT, it was a really simple prompt. And it was like magic. I put in the sentence. I think it came back with like two sentences or something. This was back in early 2023 And I just remember thinking, wow, this is incredible. I'd never experienced anything like this. What also stood out to me was there are very few moments in human history that are this democratized. I was sitting around a table with the CEO and engineers and all our data scientists, and I was a product person. And we were all figuring out together. Literally every week, we'd show up and be like, oh, I learned this or, oh, I tried this. And there's very few moments like that where nobody knows what to do with this technology. And I had the thought of, I want to help lead that. So fast forward, ended up getting in contact with the team at Wendy's. Was absolutely fascinated by the work. You know, it's still very, very early with FreshAi.
The thing that has driven me to this day is, yes, we can automate things. But the thing that's really fascinating to me, and that's helped drive the work that we've done with FreshAi, is how do you do something different? How do you use this technology to serve customers in ways that just weren't possible before? For us, that looks like creating accessibility. It looks like creating experiences. But it all comes back to, wow, I've never experienced anything like this before. What are the cool ways that we can use that?

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:02)
That's a great point because there have been no human species before that have ever had this experience. So we're all having to learn it together. I like your perspective on, it brought everybody down to level ground. I think about that with the students that I talked to in class. They're thinking about what they're going to do in the job market. I like to remind them that nobody has more than three or four years' experience in this, max. So you mentioned FreshAi. Tell us about FreshAi, how it works, and I think that will lead to some of the discussions about accessibility and things that you alluded to.

**Will Croushorn** (3:34)
Yeah. So we started out with this question of, can you take an order in the drive-through? Right now, 2025, moving to 2026, it sounds fairly simple. But at the time, that was pretty groundbreaking. Can you handle this? The drive-through is a really complex place. There's something like 200 billion ways to order a Dave's Double. That's just in English. If you try to order our menu, it's been like 67 trillion different ways to order in English. Everybody has this feeling of, oh, I just have a normal order. If I've learned anything in this process, there is no such thing as a normal order. Customers will pull up and they'll say, remove that green thing, or, oh, wait, that last thing, I don't want that. And we say one thing, but we intend something entirely different than the words that we use. And so it's really a giant complex math problem with a lot of emotions tied up. But drive-throughs are complex places. Mom pulls in to the drive-through, kids are screaming in the back, there's a line full of cars, she's tired from a long day of work, and she just wants her food and she wants it fast. There's just all of this pressure and stress that's trying to budget friendly. Then somebody comes over the speaker box, hello, can I help you? Sometimes friendly, sometimes not. We set out, can we take orders, and quickly realized there's so much more opportunity to use AI. With FreshAi, a customer can pull up, they can order in either English or in Spanish. Currently, we're working on expanding to other languages. The agent completely handles the order.