How McDonald's is using AI and experimenting with voice recognition tech for new ways to lure customers, as fast-food sales decline across the US
The fast-food chain is turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning in the hopes of predicting what customers want before they decide. Tweets: @dealbook , @krystalball , and @nytimes Tweets: @dealbook : McDonald's has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire technology companies that specialize in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The goal? To turn McDonald's into a saltier, greasier version of Amazon. https://www.nytimes.com/... Krystal Ball / @krystalball : AI being weaponized by McDonald's to make us drown our sorrows in even more fries. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : McDonald's has a plan to sell more Big Macs: act like Big Tech. The fast-food giant has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring tech companies that specialize in machine learning and AI to try to predict what customers want before they decide https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2019, with U.S. fast-food sales sliding, McDonald's was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI acquisitions — including its reported $300M-plus deal for Dynamic Yield, a machine-learning personalization startup — and experimenting with voice recognition at the drive-through, aiming to predict orders before customers decide them.
The arc since has been instructive: McDonald's kept building (edge computing for equipment failures and computer vision for order accuracy by 2025) but quietly unwound the flagship buy, selling Dynamic Yield to Mastercard in late 2021. Meanwhile rival Taco Bell pushed voice AI ordering into 500+ drive-throughs only to start reconsidering it over glitches and pranks. The 2019 ambition outlasted some of its instruments.
First-order effects
- McDonald's drive-through customers become the immediate test subjects for predictive ordering and voice recognition, with the chain betting personalized suggestions can offset declining U.S. sales.
- Dynamic Yield and other acquired teams shift from serving online retailers to tuning McDonald's menus and kiosks, redirecting their machine-learning work toward restaurant traffic.
Second-order effects
- Competitors feel compelled to match the playbook — Taco Bell's deployment of voice AI across hundreds of drive-throughs shows the arms race spreading chain-to-chain, though its glitch-driven retrenchment also sets a cautionary benchmark for how fast to scale.
- Automation startups gain a commercial channel: pandemic-era kitchen robotics from Miso Robotics and Chowbotics entering fast-food kitchens signals vendors pricing into chains' labor-and-accuracy budgets.
Third-order effects
- McDonald's sale of Dynamic Yield to Mastercard hints at where this structure lands: chains experiment with owning personalization tech, then hand it to payments-and-data platforms better positioned to run it — quick-service AI consolidating around intermediaries rather than staying in-house.
- If voice and vision systems prove reliable enough despite early stumbles, the drive-through becomes an automation node that reshapes frontline fast-food jobs, with labor substitution decided order-by-order rather than by any single rollout.
The trend: Fast-food chains are converting their unmatched physical footprint into data assets — buying AI to personalize demand, then ceding that capability to platform intermediaries when ownership proves harder than deployment.