fast food, McDonald’s, AI, artificial intelligence, QSRs The fast food industry is stepping up its adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, with market stalwarts including McDonald’s , Yum! Brands and Wendy’s expanding their deployment of the technology to streamline operations, improve profitability and enhance the customer experience.
Last week, McDonald’s Chairman and CEO Chris Kempczinski cited AI adoption among his top three trends in 2025 for the quick service restaurant industry. (The other two were protein and sauces.)
“Everybody’s talking about AI and AI certainly has a lot of applications in our business,” he said on Instagram . “We’ve got a number of teams looking at how we can use AI to deliver an even better experience for our customers and even better experience for our crew members.”
According to a December survey of restaurant operators and financiers by TD Bank, 42% said AI and automation will have the greatest impact on the restaurant industry in 2025. That’s second only to lower interest rates, at 46%.
At McDonald’s, the chain is revamping the technology footprint at its 43,000 restaurants, including enabling kitchen equipment to connect to the internet, deploying AI-powered drive-throughs and providing AI tools for its managers, CIO Brian Rice told The Wall Street Journal, per a Wednesday (March 5) report .
Kitchen equipment will have sensors that feed data into its edge computing system — where data is processed and analyzed in the store — to give franchisees a real-time view of their restaurants’ operations.
McDonald’s is also considering using computer vision with its in-store cameras to make sure orders are correct before they’re handed to customers. It is also thinking about creating a “generative AI virtual manager” that can handle administrative tasks like shift scheduling.
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McDonald’s will try its hand again at deploying an AI voice-ordering system at its drive-throughs. This time, it is partnering with Google Cloud . A similar experiment with IBM led to wrong diner orders — such as bacon ice cream — thus killing the deal .Last fall, Domino’s was […]
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