Five Guys Extends AI Voice Ordering Partnership with SoundHound

Five Guys announced on January 28, 2026, that it has renewed and expanded its partnership with SoundHound AI for AI-powered voice ordering technology. Five Guys has already processed over one million customer interactions using SoundHound's voice AI technology across hundreds of locations. Under the renewed agreement, Five Guys will provide franchisees with additional implementation options.

The U.S. quick-service restaurant sector has a staffing crisis that extends beyond wages and working conditions. In 2025, the U.S. restaurant and foodservice industry generated approximately $1.5 trillion in sales, yet the industry struggles to attract and retain workers for order-taking roles. Positions that mainly involve repetitive tasks, customer friction, and chronic understaffing during peak hours.

Every missed phone order, misheard drive-thru transaction, and abandoned order during busy service windows represents lost revenue and eroded customer loyalty. SoundHound's proprietary Speech-to-Meaning architecture combines Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in a single processing step.

The system answers 100% of incoming phone orders, including during peak hours, eliminating the missed-order problem entirely while enabling franchisees to redeploy staff toward higher-value activities like food preparation, quality assurance, and direct customer engagement.

AI voice ordering can reduce labor costs by 15-25% by automating the order-taking function. For a typical Five Guys franchise operating at 15-20% net margins, a 15-20% reduction in labor spend for order-taking represents direct profit-line expansion without revenue growth.

SoundHound's technology is trained on Five Guys' menu and designed to understand natural speech patterns, allowing customers to order as they would to a human order-taker. The system can answer questions about menu items, nutritional information, allergens, operating hours, and promotions. SoundHound's Smart Ordering system processes orders nearly three times faster than traditional mobile app ordering, according to the company's performance benchmarks.

Traditional voice assistants like Alexa operate reactively, listening for commands, processing individually, and returning single responses. Agentic systems understand customer goals, maintain context across conversations, and chain capabilities autonomously.

SoundHound's Amelia 7 orchestrates this through its "Agentic+" framework, enabling AI agents to dynamically handle complex requests. When a customer says "I want my usual burger but no pickles today, plus a milkshake, any fries specials?," an agentic system understands all three requests simultaneously. Traditional systems require customers to repeat information separately.

Amelia 7 maintains session context across turns and evolves without architectural rebuilds as franchisees add loyalty programs, menu management, or preference learning.

SoundHound powers over 14,000+ locations across various industries like restaurants, retail, healthcare, automotive. The company's market cap has surged to approximately $4.07 billion as of January 2026, with stock price momentum reflecting investor confidence in voice AI's enterprise adoption trajectory.

Wall Street analysts have set price targets ranging from $12 to $27, with DA Davidson and H.C. Wainwright maintained Buy ratings following recent analyst events where SoundHound showcased its Amelia 7.3 platform and expanded voice commerce solutions.

Rather than mandating deployment immediately, Five Guys offers franchisees the choice to implement. A franchisee facing labor shortages and margin pressure will see AI voice ordering ROI clearly including labor cost savings, improved order accuracy (reducing waste and remakes), and increased throughput during peak hours. The financial case justifies the capital investment within 12-18 months for high-traffic locations.

Competitors like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and regional burger chains inevitably deploy similar voice ordering systems within the same time period. When competing burger chains offer equivalent voice ordering experiences, the technology transition will be the key differentiator. The ordering experience becomes standardized. Customer expectations shift. What was once premium service innovation becomes baseline operational capability.

SoundHound's integration strategy focuses on seamless embedding with existing restaurant infrastructure rather than disruptive replacement. The system integrates directly with point-of-sale platforms (Square, Toast, Oracle, Olo) and kitchen display systems, reducing implementation friction and enabling rapid deployment across franchise networks.

"After decades of websites and mobile apps, we predict this is how businesses will interact with customers in this new era of AI," said CEO Keyvan Mohajer.