This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here. Convenience store giant 7-Eleven revealed last week during the Re-Work A.I. conference in San Francisco that it had opened an experimental cashierless store in Dallas in November.
Shahmeer Mirza, a 7-Eleven machine learning engineer, said people can pick up what they want and walk out, much like what shoppers can do at Amazon’s Go growing chain of cashierless stores.
Computer vision technology tracks what customers take and then, in theory, ensures that they’re charged.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s said that it’s testing kiosks at a small number of U.S. restaurants that let customers order Happy Meals and shakes by talking to a digital assistant. It’s part of a broader push by McDonald’s to incorporate advances in computers that understand language into its franchises and into its mobile apps, said German Parisi, director of applied A.I. for McDonald’s research and technology unit.
As Parsi explained, McDonald’s views A.I. “as a driving force” that can “improve the customer and employee experience.” Parsi joined McDonald’s when it bought the natural language processing startup Apprente in the fall, and he is now helping the company build a new A.I. lab in Mountain View, Calif.
For anyone waiting for 7-Eleven and McDonald’s to detail the financial rationale of their A.I. projects, this was not the time. They said little on stage about the cost or potential payoff. Instead, the companies took the opportunity to highlight their “wow, that’s cool” technology — just like Amazon, Google regularly do. But it will likely be years before 7-Eleven and McDonald’s A.I. bets pay off.
As Fortune has previously reported, consulting and analyst surveys indicate that most businesses are struggling with their A.I. projects and expect any significant financial returns to be years down the road. Moreover, in many cases, those payoffs are turning out to take far longer than initially expected.