If a robot delivers your meal, who will say hello?

Article written on 23 October 2026. This story is moving fast: some details may have changed since.

Imagine the bakery in your neighbourhood.

Every morning, the baker says hello. She knows your name. She knows you like your bread well done.

One day, a machine bakes the bread instead. A little robot brings it to your door. The bread is good, it arrives faster, and it may even cost less.

But the baker is gone. Nobody says hello any more. And what is she doing now?

The machine is neither kind nor cruel. It can save someone from burning their hands at the oven at 4am. It can also wipe a face out of your day.

That is exactly what is taking shape in fast food and meal delivery. Robots already deliver orders in some American cities, drones are starting to fly, and artificial intelligence takes orders at the drive-through. In the United States, about 3.7 million people work in fast food and at the counter: the equivalent of a very large city.

You may not meet these robots in your street tomorrow. But companies are already building the system to send them there.

The good news: nothing forces us to choose between the machine and the person. The machine can take the hard work, and the person can keep the human touch. But someone has to decide that.

So, one simple question: if a robot delivers your meal, who will say hello?

For those who want the details, here is what is happening.

The video: a delivery robot at the door

Video shared on LinkedIn by Massimiliano Leli (text in Italian), who credits the Instagram account @moh_in_shenzhen. It shows, at night, a red delivery robot in DoorDash colours handing an order to a customer. The place and date of filming are not given.

What is happening, simply put

Robots on the pavement. DoorDash is one of the big American meal delivery platforms. At the end of September 2025, it unveiled Dot, an autonomous delivery robot, meaning it can drive itself with no driver. According to CBS News, it is about 1.5 metres tall, travels at up to about 32 km/h and carries up to 13 kilos of goods. It uses roads, cycle lanes and pavements. It was first tested in the Phoenix area, in Arizona.

Drones in the sky. On 30 September 2026, DoorDash unveiled its own delivery drone, DoorDash Air, being tested in northern California with chains such as Chipotle and Popeyes. The company says about 80% of restaurant orders are light enough to fly, and that early tests deliver in under five minutes on average. These are its own figures, not yet independently verified.

AI at the drive-through. According to Fortune, McDonald's and Wendy's use AI assistants to take orders at the drive-through. Fortune also mentions kitchen robots such as Flippy, designed to flip burgers. And behind all this, AI software plans the routes, forecasts demand and assigns the orders: at DoorDash, an algorithm decides whether your meal leaves with a courier, a robot or a drone.

Artificial intelligence and ethics: work is more than a cost line

DoorDash says human couriers will keep doing most deliveries, and that robots will free them up for orders that need judgement and care. That may be true. But these jobs are often the way into working life: a first job, extra income, a chance for people without qualifications.

Three questions to ask:

• Who loses their job, and who supports them? Automating a task also means deciding what happens to the people who did it. Train them, move them, or let them go.
• Who keeps the human touch? A delivered meal is also a smile, a word, a presence. For an older or isolated person, it is sometimes the only visit of the day.
• Who decides? When an algorithm chooses between a person and a machine for each order, what criteria does it use? Speed? Cost? Safety?

Customers seem to have a view. According to a Metrigy study cited by Fortune, about 8 in 10 consumers still prefer a person to an AI agent when placing an order. As we saw with Nvidia's little robots, technology is moving faster than our thinking about what we really want.

The hope: automate the hard work, not the relationship

Nothing is written in advance. The same tools can serve two very different projects. The first replaces people to save a few minutes and a few cents. The second hands machines the dangerous, repetitive or exhausting tasks, and gives people back time for relationships, advice and care.

The choice is not made in a laboratory. It is made in every company, every restaurant, and in our habits as customers too.

Are we really going to build a tower of Babel?

When I launched allelu.ai, I wrote that the real question is not whether we should use artificial intelligence, but what we want it to serve. Delivery robots are a very concrete example.

The tower of Babel would be delivery that is ever faster, ever cheaper, ever more automatic, until we forget the people who cooked, delivered and welcomed. A tower built on performance, where nobody says hello any more.

The city would be machines that carry the heavy loads, drive at night in the rain, and leave people what only they can do: recognise a face, reassure, take care.

For now, nothing is settled. These robots are only at the start of their journey. Now is precisely the moment we can choose. AI is a revolution. Humanity remains our responsibility.

What about you?

Would you accept a delivery from a robot? And in your own work, what would you happily hand to a machine, and what would you never let it do?

If you found this article useful, sign up to the allelu.ai newsletter: every Thursday evening, one piece of AI news explained simply, through the lens of ethics. And forward this article to someone who should read it.

This race for speed and abundance, at the risk of forgetting what matters, lies at the heart of my book L'abondance tuera (in French).

Reynald Naulleau is the author of L'abondance tuera and the founder of Allelu AI (allelu.ai), a place to understand artificial intelligence and ethics, without jargon.

Sources

• Massimiliano Leli, LinkedIn post with the video (in Italian): see the post
• CBS News, "DoorDash unleashes fleet of delivery bots, called Dots, onto streets of Phoenix", 30 September 2025: read the article
• Arizona Technology Council, on the Dot rollout in Tempe and Mesa, October 2025: read the article
• DoorDash, "DoorDash Air Unveils Drone Delivery System for Local Businesses", 30 September 2026: read the press release
• Fortune (via Yahoo Finance), on AI at the drive-through and the Metrigy study, 30 July 2026: read the article
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, food service employment in May 2023: see the data

Written with the help of AI, reviewed and approved by Reynald Naulleau.