McDonald's Partners With IBM to Replace Drive-Thru Employees With AI

McDonald's is partnering with IBM to implement artificial intelligence tech to take orders at its drive-thru lanes. "In my mind, IBM is the ideal partner for McDonald's given their expertise in building AI-powered customer care solutions and voice recognition," McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said during a Wednesday earnings call, as quoted by CNBC. It's arguably the last thing we need: the kind of frustration we get from trying to communicate with AI-powered software -- cough, Siri -- could make anybody rip their hair out the next time they hit up a fast food joint. And that's not to mention losing more human jobs to automated systems, a worrying trend that's already well underway. In 2019, the restaurant chain bought a tech startup called Apprente and renamed it McD Tech Labs.