Dive Brief:
- McDonald’s will deploy ArchIQ, an artificial intelligence-powered restaurant operating system, as part of its Next strategy, Jill McDonald, McDonald’s executive vice president and global chief restaurant experience officer, said Wednesday during the company’s Investor Day.
- The chain will use ArchIQ in drive-thru voice AI, automated inventory tracking, connected equipment that includes computer vision, and to ensure order accuracy, Brian Rice, executive vice president and global chief information officer, said during the event.
- The technology will reduce complexity and free up labor hours, allowing crew to focus more on the customer experience, McDonald said. Technology is one of the key tenets of McDonald’s Next strategy, which also covers upgrading the menu, improving the customer and team experiences and modernizing restaurants.
Dive Insight:
The fast food giant has spent the last few years building a digital foundation that will power ArchIQ. Since partnering with Google in 2023, McDonald’s has deployed Google Edge technology to thousands of restaurants across seven major markets, and it will bring the technology to the U.S. in 2027, Rice said.
McDonald’s has built a unified point-of-sales system across nearly all of its markets, moving from “fragmented, bespoke local systems to a consistent platform built for rapid innovation,” Rice said.
The chain has also built a “lake” of standard restaurant data directly connected to restaurant-level operations, Rice said.
“This allows our AI models to make accurate split-second decisions,” Rice said. “By interconnecting the operational heartbeat of over 46,000 restaurants worldwide, our data lake captures billions of data points daily.”
That digital foundation makes it possible for ArchIQ to provide “automation, diagnostics, predictive alerts and coaching into a single platform used by our crew, restaurant managers, franchisees and our operations team,” he said.
Rice said ArchIQ allows for the deployment of Archy, its voice AI technology, at the drive-thru. Archy can take orders in both English and Spanish and has accuracy above 90%, Rice said.
“In our early test restaurants with Archy, drive-thru customer satisfaction is above national trends,” Rice said. “As Archy scales, it will free at least 50 labor hours per week. This is one of the most significant and tangible benefits of ArchIQ.”
Automated inventory counting under ArchIQ will eliminate a tedious and time-consuming task, by allowing employees to manage stock in real time with Bluetooth Low Energy tags. Rice said this will save about five labor hours per week and reduce food waste by 15%.
Connected equipment and computer vision will improve food quality and consistency, Rice said. This technology can also predictively manage equipment and can drive about a 50% improvement in key equipment and menu availability per restaurant, which Rice described as “unprecedented.”
ArchIQ will also be used with accuracy scales to verify “millions of orders every single day,” Rice said.
“These enable our crew to catch and correct 10% of those orders before they ever reach the customer,” Rice said.
Executives did not provide exact timing for a complete rollout of ArchIQ, but McDonald said restaurants have to meet technology prerequisites and that deployment is “conditions based.”
“We verify restaurant readiness before anything scales,” McDonald said. “Every deployment is held to our global operating and investment standards, so we deliver the expected execution, quality and returns.”
McDonald’s has made use of artificial intelligence in the past, including when it bought Dynamic Yield in 2019 to deploy the technology, which made menu suggestions based on time and weather, at its drive-thrus and ordering kiosks. But it sold the tech to Mastercard in 2021. It later worked with IBM to test drive-thru voice AI starting in 2021, but the tech struggled with order accuracy, and the fast food chain ended that partnership in 2024.
Other fast food chains have been investing in artificial intelligence, including Yum Brands and Burger King. Yum unveiled Byte, a centralized tech platform, in 2025 and has been testing and expanding voice AI at Taco Bell drive-thrus. Burger King is using a voice-AI tool for its restaurant headsets called “Patty” to help workers and managers with point of sale, kitchen equipment, inventory and digital ordering.
Clarification: This article has been updated to reflect the accuracy of McDonald's Archy voice AI application.
