Venti iced coffee, light skim milk. That’s what I get at Starbucks. It is what I have gotten at Starbucks every time I’ve been to Starbucks for as long as I can remember, other than a brief love affair with the caffe misto a few years ago. In person, my brain barely needs to activate to say the words aloud; in the app, it’s four taps and I’m ready to go.
My first time ordering Starbucks through its new ChatGPT integration, which launched last week, was comparatively a complete mess. Getting started is easy enough, if not exactly obvious: Just open ChatGPT and type “@Starbucks” plus your order. You can probably guess what happens next, right? I promise you’re wrong. “Order me a Venti iced coffee with light skim milk,” I typed, to which ChatGPT responded: “The Iced Coffee is exactly what you’re after—cold-brewed and served unsweetened, so adding light skim milk will keep it smooth without getting heavy.” Cool, thanks for the info ChatGPT. Please order me coffee.
Above the message, ChatGPT added what I figured out was a menu, showing the three most likely things I might have meant by “iced coffee.” Iced Coffee was the first option, victory! But I had to select “Customize,” then scroll through the pop-up UI and select both the right size and the milk addition, or else when I tapped “Add to cart” I got just a Grande black iced coffee.
I should note that this had already taken longer than it takes to open the Starbucks app, tap “Order,” tap the name of the closest store, tap the plus sign next to the drink I always get, and check out. But I soldiered on: I got the drink I wanted in the cart, and then went to add my wife’s drink to my order. She calls it “the fruity tea,” which is not a name, but is the kind of fuzzy search ChatGPT ought to handle well! It offered me Iced Green Tea Lemonade, which is a reasonable but wrong guess. I eventually remembered it was the Passion Tango Tea, at which point ChatGPT offered me another enthusiastic description of the tea. Once again, I scrolled up, I customized, and I added to cart.
At that moment, I got an ominous pop-up: “This chat is nearing its limit.” I’m a free-tier ChatGPT user, but I haven’t touched the app in weeks (I’m mostly a Claude guy these days), so hitting the limit this fast was a bit surprising. Also, why is there a limit at all, when I’m trying to do a thing that theoretically makes both ChatGPT and Starbucks a bunch of money? To get things done as quickly as possible, I went to check out. Turns out, ChatGPT has my location wrong, and offered a list of stores half a state away from me. When I went to the map view, where ChatGPT said I could change my location, all I got was an “Oops! Something went wrong.” message. And right about then, I got another pop-up: “You’re out of messages with the most advanced Free model.” It told me it would reset — in five hours. Until then, I’d be shunted to some other, lesser model.
Any rational person would have given up a while ago, right? This is a straight-up terrible ordering experience, made vastly more complicated by the back-and-forth chat system that conferred exactly zero discernable AI upside. But, like a good journalist, I tried again — I started over, @-mentioned Starbucks, and told it my order as succinctly as possible. It confirmed my request, and then let me down gently. “I can’t place your order directly or add it to a real cart,” it said, before offering to walk me through how to use the Starbucks app. Evidently, the model I’d been downgraded to didn’t support the more advanced Starbucks features — or have any idea what I’d just been up to.
I can’t shake the idea that this app — like so many AI tools — appears to be designed for people that simply don’t exist. In Starbucks’ own blog post, it suggests you might prompt the app with things like “Recommend a drink that matches the vibe of my outfit” or “I’m in the mood for something cozy and nutty.” Is that how anyone actually decides their beverage of choice? At best, these features are silly fun. At worst, they’ll lead to even more people dreaming up ridiculous, 12-ingredient, made-to-be-TikToked drinks that drive baristas batty all day.
The actual dream of AI coffee ordering has been the same for a long time: I want to say “order me coffee,” and my assistant should know exactly what to get me and from where. The tech industry tried this in the era of Google Assistant and Alexa, and they’re trying again in the times of ChatGPT. There’s a chance that truly useful AI agents, like the ones Google is testing with Gemini, can go click around for you and get the job done automatically. But chat ain’t it, friends. Coffee ordering, like so many things in life, is not a creative experience designed for conversation. It is a transaction. Ideally, a very short one, because I haven’t had my coffee yet.