Presto Automation sold fast-food chains an AI voice assistant that took customers’ orders at the drive-thru. Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Del Taco and Checkers all used it. Presto told restaurant owners that the assistant would free their employees from taking orders at the speaker and save each location 5 to 10 hours of employee time a day.
Presto sold stock to investors during those same years and told them the AI completed more than 95% of orders without help from restaurant staff.
What Presto didn’t tell investors was that it had hired people in the Philippines and India to listen to the drive-thru orders and type them in. Those people handled what a US regulator later described as ‘the vast majority of drive-thru orders.’
That regulator was the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency that polices what public companies tell their investors. The SEC investigated Presto and concluded in January 2025 that the company’s statements to investors had been false and misleading. It explained that Presto counted an order as completed by the AI as long as no restaurant employee stepped in, including orders Presto’s own overseas staff had typed. Presto accepted the SEC’s order without admitting or denying its findings.
By the time the SEC published those findings, Presto’s stock had been delisted from Nasdaq, and the business had been sold to new owners. The SEC didn’t fine Presto because of the company’s financial condition and its cooperation with the investigation.
Using people to support an AI system is legal. You may run one that way yourself if someone on your staff finishes the tasks your AI can’t do or reviews what it produces. Presto had two problems that you can check for in your own AI system.
Presto’s AI cost more to run than it earned. Each restaurant paid Presto a fee, and Presto paid the off-site staff who typed in that restaurant’s orders. The product could only make money when the AI entered enough orders on its own. Presto’s AI was far below that level.
Presto described its AI with a figure that left out its own staff. Investors saw 95% and had no way to know how many orders people typed.
Below, you’ll get a spreadsheet calculator that tells you how much of your AI system’s work your staff can do before the system costs more than it earns. You’ll get the three figures to report whenever someone asks how well your AI system performs. You’ll also see what each of those figures turned out to be at Presto.