McDonald’s is revamping its 43,000 restaurants with AI-powered technology as part of a new initiative to better the in-restaurant experience for its customers and workers, the fast-food chain’s Chief Information Officer Brian Rice told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
“Our restaurants, frankly, can be very stressful. We have customers at the counter, we have customers at our drive-through, couriers coming in for delivery, delivery at curbside. That’s a lot to deal with for our crew,” Rice said. “Technology solutions will alleviate the stress.”
Back in Dec. 2023, McDonald’s partnered with Google Cloud to advance the chain’s technology across thousands of restaurants worldwide. Such advancements were made to the McDonald’s mobile app along with its self-service kiosks, which received a handful of complaints from customers online.
“We see tremendous opportunity for growth in our digital business and our partnership with Google Cloud allows us to capitalize on this by leveraging our size and scale to build capabilities and implement solutions at unmatched speeds,” Rice said at the time, per a news release. “Connecting our restaurants worldwide to millions of datapoints across our digital ecosystem means tools get sharper, models get smarter, restaurants become easier to operate, and most importantly, the overall experience for our customers and crew gets even better.”
In his Wednesday interview, Rice said McDonald’s is implementing edge computing, which “can be a faster, cheaper option than sending data to the cloud,” per the WSJ. The technology setup can help predict when kitchen equipment, like fryers and McDonald’s McFlurry ice cream machines, will break down, Rice explained. It can also offer “franchisees a ‘real-time’ view into how their restaurants are operating” and “analyze that data for early signs of a maintenance problem,” the WSJ reported.
McDonald’s hopes the new technology will help grow its number of customers from 175 million to 250 million by 2027.
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