‘AI’m lovin’ it’: McDonald’s orders a dash of Google’s generative AI to optimise operations

McDonald’s has announced a new multi-year, global partnership with Google. With this partnership, the fast food chain will use Google Cloud technology to connect its restaurants worldwide. McDonald’s plans to leverage a wide range of Google Cloud’s hardware, data, and AI technologies to implement innovation faster and create even better experiences for its customers, restaurant teams and employees.
How this partnership will help McDonald’s
As part of this partnership, McDonald’s will roll out major updates to its restaurant and customer platforms. From its mobile app that serves as the gateway for its 150 million members to its thousands of self-service kiosks in restaurants worldwide will benefit from the Google partnership.
In a blog post, the restaurant chain notes that it will use edge computing from Google Cloud to power these new platforms. This will bring information storage and high-powered computing to individual restaurants.
Google Distributed Cloud, a combined hardware and software offering, is planned to be deployed to thousands of McDonald’s restaurants. This will help the company leverage both cloud-based software apps and their software and AI solutions locally on-site, as needed.

With Google Cloud edge computing capabilities, McDonald’s will be able to draw new insights into how equipment is performing, enact solutions that reduce business disruptions, and diminish complexity for crew so restaurant teams can focus on delivering amazing hospitality to customers.

McDonald’s is set to be the largest global food service retailer to use Google Distributed Cloud’s new capabilities. The company is also planning to roll out Google’s hardware and software upgrades for thousands of restaurants in 2024.
Through this new partnership, a dedicated Google Cloud team in Chicago will work close to McDonald’s global innovation centre, which is also known as Speedee Labs.
Together, they’ll focus on applying generative AI across several key business priorities to power new experiences for crew and customers.