McDonald’s Is Letting AI Take Your Orders Again. A Million Orders Later, the Results Look Promising.

McDonald’s (MCD) recently partnered with Alphabet's (GOOGL) (GOOG) Google to implement an AI-powered automated order-taking system at its drive-thru. The initiative called ArchIQ, still in the experimental phase, has currently been installed in just five branches in the U.S. Interestingly, this is not McDonald’s first attempt at using AI to improve its operations. The company had previously worked with IBM (IBM) to make a similar AI ordering system called AOT (Automated Order Taking), which failed because of its poor accuracy. This time around, the results appear to be more promising, with the five locations undertaking over a million transactions at around a 90% success rate.

The strive for a change is part of McDonald’s new brand strategy, “McDonald’s > NEXT.” The Chairman and CEO, Chris Kempczinski, stated that the strategy will spur growth, productivity, and profitability across the chain’s locations. He believes that with competitors upgrading their menus, improving food quality, etc., they needed to keep up to remain the customers’ first choice. The CEO also claimed that with the staff having to interact less with the customers, the quality of the interactions is likely to go up, which he believes will improve the hospitality as well.