McDonald’s Is Betting Billions on an A.I.-Powered Future

The fast-food giant plans to deploy generative A.I., connected kitchens and smarter restaurant systems as it seeks to make tens of thousands of locations more efficient.

CHICAGO — For decades, the machinery behind a McDonald’s restaurant was relatively easy to recognize: grills, fryers, cash registers and drive-through headsets.

Increasingly, another system is operating behind the counter: artificial intelligence.

McDonald’s this week unveiled an ambitious new growth and modernization strategy that places A.I., data and automation at the center of its effort to transform how its restaurants operate. The company said it plans to provide roughly $8.5 billion in support through 2036 to accelerate restaurant modernization, technology deployment and other operational improvements, including about $5 billion through 2030.

The investment is broader than A.I. alone. But artificial intelligence has become an important part of the company’s strategy.

At the center of the effort is ArchIQ, a technology platform that McDonald’s says will use generative A.I. and other digital systems to improve restaurant operations. McDonald’s plans to deploy the technology at scale across its U.S. and internationally operated markets as part of a larger strategy it calls McDonald’s > NEXT.

The company says those changes, combined with restaurant redesigns and operational improvements, could ultimately produce roughly 250 basis points of gross restaurant-level efficiency gains — equivalent to about $100,000 in annual cash-flow benefits for an average U.S. restaurant, according to McDonald’s estimates.

It is an enormous experiment in what happens when artificial intelligence leaves the laptop and enters the kitchen.

A Smarter Restaurant

McDonald’s has been building toward this moment for years.

The company entered a broad technology partnership with ⁠Google Cloud in 2023, seeking to bring cloud computing and generative A.I. technology into thousands of restaurants.

One important piece of that system is edge computing, which places computing resources inside or close to individual restaurants rather than requiring every piece of information to travel to a distant data center.

McDonald’s said last year that the technology was already operating in hundreds of American restaurants and was expanding internationally.

The implications extend well beyond taking orders.

Connected kitchen equipment can generate information about how machines are performing. Artificial intelligence can analyze those signals and potentially identify equipment problems before a machine fails.