McDonald’s Customers Will Get Their Meals With a Side of AI

It's getting so tiresome. Improve products? Improve service? Improve quality? Improve efficiency? Improve literally anything? Nahh, let's slap an LLM on it and see whether we can fire some people.

Truly, I'm happy for them to continue to provide me with ever more compelling reasons to shun them.

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So it will be wrong every time?

Here's what I don't understand.

McDonalds has an app. McDonalds also does mobile orders like ubereats. Why not use your own app to allow ordering from the app, so you can be 5 minutes away, order, and when you get there it's already paid for, you just pick it up.

It eliminates extra fees for customers willing to pick up their own food. It eliminates the line. It reduces the wrong orders (as most mistakes happen from the register worker not ringing it up right to begin with). And no AI needed.

Why is this so hard?

Those include connecting kitchen equipment to the internet, and outfitting them with sensors providing real-time data feeds that the generative apps will analyze and respond to.

I eagerly await the day that the ice cream machine will be down down from ransomware.

Along with that, of course, the global fast-food giant will look to improve customer experience by introducing AI to allow drive-through, kiosk, and app tech serve visitor more effectively.

Oh cool, I can get a side of nazi apologism with my sandwich!

"Here is your big mac meal"

"but I ordered a McChicken sandwich"

"don't worry, our AI suggested swapping your order because it predicted you actually prefer chicken based on your order history which it got from facial recognition when you walked in so we started preparing it before you ordered which also meant we'd get your order out 9.4 second faster! Isn't it so clever, eh?"

"what about my drink, I didn't order diet coke?"

"we gave you diet because our AI indicated that you probably have diabetes based on body weight analysis and McDonald's is committed to healthy eating as well as maximising profits"

"I want to talk to the manager."

"the manager was replaced by AI last month, corporate felt on site managers were one of the biggest expenditures for the branches and felt AI can offer more value. I'm sure the AI will be able to help you at that terminal over there. If not, we can escalate to the corporate AI which is authorised to offer 1% off coupons and has a slight antisemitism problem..."

"the terminal over there? The one with the queue 30 minutes long?"

"yep, that's the one. Have a great day!! Oh it looks like our conversation took longer than the time we saved. Oh well, isn't AI though"

Good thing I stopped going there after their greedy asses raised prices more than any other fast food establishment. Fuck them and their shitty food, I haven't missed it one bit.

A certain alabaster fortress near me encourages you to use an AI when ordering at the drive thru. It's terrible. It had the hardest time decoding my order of "a number one with cheese." I hate that this is the direction the industry is moving.

I don’t think I’ve had Micky D’s in at least a decade. And it was probably close to the same amount of time before that.

Guess I’ll just continue not eating there unless the choice is literally nothing.

McDonald’s credits its success to giving customers a variety of menu items they love, served up quickly in what the company calls one of the best values in the market.*

Every other fast food place is either the same average price, or cheaper than McDonald's while many traditional sit down restaurants are also the same price or cheaper. Best value my ass.

I DESPISE AI in fast food restaurants... as well as just about everywhere else... but in fast food it really pisses me off.

I crave salty trash food every once in a while, but when my local Taco Bell greeted me with an obviously AI drive-thru, I just drove away and never came back.

Fast food and retail were the places you went to get your first job with no experience or school necessary. Using AI to 'take their jobs' in the pursuit of 'efficiency' is just adding velocity to our plunge into dystopia. I mean no disrespect to those working those currently jobs, though, as the 'were' in that sentence is carrying a lot and the article is right that the jobs are stressful and relentless, and it angers me that your livelihood is yet again being threatened by corporate greed.

If there were compensating factors, like UBI, free higher education and better worker protections, then sure, let's let "ai" take over the things that we don't want to do... but I don't think we're going in that direction.

My days of never going to McD’s sure are coming to a middle

Another reason not to go there.

Making better food never crossed their mind.

I think this is just an attempt to shoehorn the words "AI" in McDonald's business plan in order to attract investors.
What would they even use it for? I think developing and using AI for the applications they describe in the article would be too much hassle for little profit.
Add in the notorious unreliability of AI, and you got a big McNothing Burger.