Dive Brief:
- McDonald’s tapped Google Cloud to infuse cloud-based analytics across thousands of its restaurants and develop AI solutions, the two companies announced Wednesday.
- The multiyear partnership spans hardware, data and AI technologies, deploying Google Distributed Cloud compute and storage to individual restaurants next year, the announcement said.
- “Connecting our restaurants worldwide to millions of datapoints across our digital ecosystem means tools get sharper, models get smarter, restaurants become easier to operate, and most importantly, the overall experience for our customers and crew gets even better,” Brian Rice, EVP and global CIO at McDonald's, said in the announcement.
Dive Insight:
Modernization is an ongoing process that evolves as enhanced capabilities and emerging technologies enter the enterprise sphere. Initial migrations moved servers off premises to centralized data centers for improved efficiency and scalability, but cloud’s reach is expanding as the technology matures.
McDonald’s will install edge servers managed by Google Cloud on-prem for faster, low-latency analytics and enhancements to customer platforms, including the McDonald’s mobile app and self-service in-store kiosks. Individual restaurants will gain access to cloud-based software and AI solutions on-site.
“This will help accelerate automation innovation from equipment manufacturers and allow restaurant general managers to quickly spot and enact solutions to reduce business disruptions,” McDonald’s said in a Wednesday statement. “This will also reduce complexity for crew and lead to customer benefits such as hotter, fresher food.”
McDonald’s is the largest food service retailer to adopt Google Distributed Cloud, which rolled out high-performance machines, Vertex AI integrations, and a managed database solution in August. The hyperscaler unleashed its Gemini series LLMs Wednesday and promised to deploy them in Vertex AI over the coming weeks.
As part of the partnership, Google Cloud is placing a dedicated team in Chicago, near McDonald’s Speedee Labs innovation hub, to explore generative AI use cases.
The fast food giant said it aims to open 50,000 new restaurants and expand its loyalty program to 250 million active users by 2027, when it expects 30% of delivery orders to originate via mobile app.
