I’ll be at the ASU+GSV Summit next week so if you’ll be there, drop me a line here or hit me up on the event app.
Now onto my favorite restaurant in the world…
Taco Bell.
Yum! Brands — which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut and has a larger restaurant footprint than any other company globally — recently announced a partnership with Nvidia to deploy AI (including AI voice ordering) throughout hundreds of restaurants starting in April.
Similarly, Jersey Mike's Subs has partnered with SoundHound on a 50-store pilot of AI voice ordering, while Wendy's now uses Google Cloud LLMs to process orders in English and Spanish.
It looks like voice AI may have found its sweet spot: ordering fries with that.
Voice AI stands to reduce labor costs in high-turnover positions while also increasing order throughput and accuracy. It also means staff can be redeployed to food preparation or customer service roles that drive higher satisfaction.
But fast food is just the tip of the iceberg for voice AI.
Below, we get into:
Why voice AI matters
Market maturity
Challenges to adoption
Why does voice AI matter?
For customer interactions, voice conversations offer a far more expressive mode of communication than text-based channels.
Yet the industry remains stuck in a purgatory of robo-call decision trees and endless holds. 62% of customer calls to SMBs go unanswered, while upwards of 70% of business calls that connect still end up putting customers on hold, with most hanging up within minutes.
Advances in AI speech models could break this cycle. Voice AI models are shifting toward processing audio directly — rather than needing to translate it to text, process it using an LLM, then convert it back into speech — and are getting closer to the cadence of human conversation (<300ms latency).
The progress has fueled a surge in equity funding to voice AI solutions, which grabbed $2.1B in 2024, per CB Insights’ funding data. Momentum has continued in 2025 so far, with companies raising nearly $500M in Q1’25.
ElevenLabs' $180M round from investors including a16z, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia Capital was a big part of this year's strong start. ElevenLabs has already hit $100M in ARR — just 3 years after its founding.
On the whole, though, the voice AI market remains in its early stages — and faces growing pains.
The market is still nascent
Most of the voice AI market remains in the earlier stages of commercial maturity, with 85% in levels 1, 2, or 3 on CB Insights’ Commercial Maturity scale. More than half are still developing or validating their products, while 39% are beginning commercial distribution and starting to gain customers.
Most startups here were founded in just the last 3 years, as the chart below demonstrates. 2023 was a breakout year, seeing the number of companies founded grow 2x year-over-year, from 35 to 70.
This growth has been driven by advancements in voice AI models — including OpenAI's Realtime API for speech-to-speech applications, launched in late 2024 — which jumpstarted applications across use cases.
Despite the excitement, challenges remain around reliability and trust.
Voice AI agents still struggle with complex conversations and unpredictable inputs, leading most enterprises to start out by deploying them in low-stakes scenarios.
In theory, fast-food ordering should be a natural fit — interactions are brief and highly predictable. The AI only needs to understand a limited vocabulary of items and modifiers.
But the reputational risk of even the occasional mishap can be high. McDonald’s, for instance, started a voice AI pilot with IBM back in 2021, but pulled it in 2024 after videos of inaccurate orders went viral on TikTok.
Customer acceptance of voice AI interaction also varies dramatically by region. As one Cognigy customer told us:
Meanwhile, a strategic divide is emerging in the voice AI market: cloud vs. edge processing.
Cloud-based solutions from tech giants offer advanced capabilities but raise privacy concerns, while edge-based platforms process data locally with better privacy but more limited features.
This divide will shape which players win in different sectors, with edge solutions likely dominating in sensitive industries like healthcare and financial services, while cloud platforms prevail in consumer and retail applications.
For more on how AI will shape every aspect of the customer experience, get the free report here.
TLDR — Tech loves drama, right?
Here's a roundup of recent tech drama:
Altman ultimatum: A new report details what really happened when OpenAI’s board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman in 2023. Independent directors and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever compiled evidence of “dozens of examples of [Altman’s] alleged lies and other toxic behavior” — from safety review lapses to misleading the board about personal financial ties. But the board didn’t anticipate the backlash from employees, execs, and investors following the firing announcement. Even Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati, who had also shared evidence against Altman, signed a letter threatening to quit if he wasn’t reinstated. The rest is history.
SBF on the road: Sam Bankman-Fried has been moved from a Brooklyn jail to a federal facility in Oklahoma — a pit stop for inmates in transit. The FTX founder, who’s serving 25 years for fraud, was booted from his high-profile cellblock (home to Diddy and others) after a media spree that included an unauthorized Tucker Carlson interview. That stunt got him tossed in solitary confinement and triggered a prison probe. Bankman-Fraud is reportedly angling for a Trump pardon.
SnubHub: StubHub’s newly filed IPO is drawing controversy. The company’s S-1 credits CEO Eric Baker as the sole founder, omitting Jeff Fluhr, who co-founded the business with Baker while they were students at Stanford. In a LinkedIn post, Fluhr accuses Baker of rewriting history and leaving him out of the company’s origin story. Venture capitalist Greg Bettinelli backed Fluhr, calling the omission “revisionist.” The disagreement has resurfaced just as StubHub prepares to go public, potentially raising over $1B.
Cheat code: Chungin “Roy” Lee, a Columbia CS student, says he was kicked out after launching Interview Coder, an AI app that helps users cheat technical interviews. He used it to land offers from Meta, TikTok, Capital One — and Amazon, where he filmed the entire process. After the video went viral, Columbia suspended him. But Lee now says he makes $170K/month selling subscriptions to the app and has no regrets.
Bad apple: France fined Apple €150M, saying its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) system makes it too hard to reject third-party tracking. Regulators argue Apple’s “double consent” rule puts smaller ad-funded apps at a disadvantage. Apple denies wrongdoing but could face more pressure as other EU regulators are also reviewing its practices.
23andBankrupt: DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after a rough stretch of layoffs and lawsuits. Once valued at $6B, the company never bounced back from a massive 2023 data breach and fading demand for its one-time-use kits. Co-founder Anne Wojcicki stepped down as CEO on Sunday after her buyout offer was rejected. Instead, 23andMe will head to a court-supervised auction. The company says it’ll keep running, but regulators are urging users to delete their DNA data before ownership changes hands.
