New York/USA
At this year’s Global Payments Genius Conference, one of the most anticipated sessions was the “Enterprise Automation at Scale” panel. In a fully attended session by CIOs and industry executives, it quickly became clear why the topic had drawn so much attention.
The collaboration between Genius, Bojangles, and Hi Auto is an enterprise deployment active across almost five hundred restaurants and is now entering its next phase of capabilities.
It was the first time that Bojangles and Hi Auto revealed a brand-new set of features already in production that elevate what is possible in the drive-thru.
What surprised many in the room
The traditional POS API was never designed for Voice AI. It originated as a system built for web-based digital ordering that needs to inject orders and can tolerate some delays. Through the new Genius XPI release, Bojangles and Hi Auto have extended the stability and structure of an enterprise POS platform directly into real-time drive-thru Voice AI.
In conversations with several executives who attended the session, many shared that they assumed native real-time POS-to-Voice AI integration was still years away. But as Richard Del Valle explained on stage, the true barrier was not the conceptual technology. The barrier was achieving consistent reliability across a large distributed operation. The Genius and Hi Auto collaboration appears to have solved that challenge.
The operational capabilities that caught attention
Crystal Deadrick, Hi Auto’s Head of Sales, revealed a new set of native POS and Voice AI capabilities that make the integration seamless and introduce important benefits to the many Bojangles locations using Bo Linda, the brand’s Voice AI system. These capabilities were described as part of what makes the Bojangles drive-thru experience work with such consistency at scale.
Immediate item-by-item injection for faster service time
Items spoken by the guest are added to the order instantly and displayed in real-time on both the drive-thru screen and the kitchen display systems. Guests can confirm or correct their order immediately, and kitchen teams can begin preparing items without waiting for the full order. Kitchen staff can work in real time as the order forms are being filled. This reduces service time and increases throughput across the drive-thru.
Support for dual lane drive-thru operations
Voice AI locations with dual lane drive-thrus often struggle to match each order to the correct vehicle when the lanes merge. Bojangles has solved this issue. Through the Genius XPI and Hi Auto integration, each order now includes an image of the car that placed it. This gives staff immediate visual confirmation and significantly reduces mix-ups during busy periods.
Local routing for true reliability
The XPI interface provides local data routing rather than relying solely on cloud processing. This protects operations from cloud connectivity issues, eliminates latency, and keeps the drive-thru running smoothly. Operators noted that this design is already contributing to further improvements in menu time.
Why franchisees embraced the system
Del Valle noted that franchisees were persuaded by real operational performance rather than theoretical benefits. As the deployment expanded from 100 to 300 to nearly 500 restaurants, order completion rates remained around 93% and accuracy consistently exceeded 96%.
With measurable improvements in speed of service, order flow, and consistency, franchisees increasingly adopted the system as a reliable operational asset.
Why this moment matters for the QSR industry
In discussions with several executives after the session, a shared sentiment emerged. This integration signals a shift in what the industry now expects from automation. Voice AI is no longer evaluated solely on conversational performance. It must now deliver reliability, real-time execution, and deep compatibility with mission-critical systems.
The Genius and Hi Auto collaboration shows that these expectations are now achievable at scale. It raises the standard for what drive-thru automation must deliver and represents a significant step forward for the QSR industry.
Voice AI is an enterprise-grade, mission-critical system that must be optimized and consistent across all parameters: speed, accuracy, latency, procedures, insights and analytics, and learning and training.
