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McDonald’s is the latest fast food restaurant to use artificial intelligence to step up its game.
The fast food giant is overhauling all 43,000 restaurants with an AI makeover in an attempt to cut wait times and make a better experience for both customers and employees.
Upgrades will start with internet-connected kitchen equipment, AI-enabled drive-throughs and AI-powered tools for managers to help make sure that orders are accurate and so restaurants can predict equipment issues before they shut down.
To accomplish this mission, the company tapped Google Cloud in late 2023 to implement more computing power in restaurants, allowing them to process and analyze data on-site. Known as edge computing, the setup is generally a faster and cheaper option than sending the data to the cloud.
Suppliers have already begun to install sensors on the equipment that will ultimately give the data to the system and allow employees to see how the restaurant is operating in real time.
“Our restaurants, frankly, can be very stressful,” Brian Rice, McDonald’s Chief Information Officer, said regarding employees who face these issues, The Sun reported.
“We have customers at the counter, we have customers at our drive-through, couriers coming in for delivery, delivery at curbside,” he continued. “That’s a lot to deal with for our crew. Technology solutions will alleviate the stress.”
The chain is also looking into computer vision — the type of AI behind facial recognition — in store cameras to determine whether orders are accurate before they go into customer hands.
McDonald’s hopes that the AI upgrades will help grow loyal Golden Arches customers from 175 million to 250 million by 2027.
Rice shared that the Golden Arches will be looking for a “generative AI virtual manager” that will perform administrative tasks including shift scheduling instead of a manager.
The edge computing system will also be able to power voice AI at the drive-through, which McDonald’s is exploring with Google’s cloud-computing arm — a venture they have already unsuccessfully tried out.
In 2021, McDonald’s teamed up with IBM to use artificial intelligence software to take customers’ orders. In July 2024, the Golden Arches ended its AI-powered automated drive-thru experiment at more than 100 locations after angry customers reported receiving items they didn’t order.
But McD’s isn’t the first fast food chain to do this. Wendy’s recently announced that it will implement artificial intelligence to help take orders at hundreds of their drive-through windows by the end of the year.
Wendy’s AI voice assistant — dubbed “FreshAI” — first began testing in 2023 and is currently used in about 100 Wendy’s locations, and it’s expected to expand to somewhere between 500 and 600 locations by the end of the year.
