McDonald’s announces plans to strengthen AI investments by 2027

McDonald’s plans to “double down” on its artificial intelligence investments by 2027 and is betting on India to be a key hub for data governance, engineering and platform architecture, a senior executive said on Friday.

The fast-food giant, which entered India in 1996, operates hundreds of restaurants across the country and recently set up a global office in the southern city of Hyderabad, with an aim to make it the largest outside the United States.

“We’re still in the early stages, so it’s hard to pin down the exact investment,” McDonald’s head of Global Business Services operations, Deshant Kaila, said in an interview on the sidelines of an event in Hyderabad.

McDonald’s is using AI to verify orders at 400 restaurants to pre-empt errors before handing them over to customers, and expects to roll this out to 40,000 locations globally by 2027, Durga Prakash, head of technology (global offices), said.

The fast-food giant is also using AI tools to forecast sales, decide on pricing and assess product performance and is building a personalised app, which would work across countries, according to Kaila.

He said the India push will centre on building its AI team, but added that spending will lean more toward technology and tools, not headcount.

The company is in talks to set up a global office in Poland, just like the ones in India and Mexico, according to Durga Prakash.

Earlier this year, the southern Indian state of Telangana said that McDonald’s would launch a global capability center, employing 2,000 people in Hyderabad.

India’s global capability centers, once low-cost outsourcing hubs for global corporations, have evolved to support their parent organisations in domains ranging from operations and finance to research and development.

—Rishika Sadam, Reuters