Ryan Owen holds an MBA from the University of South Carolina, and has rich experience in financial services, having worked with Liberty Mutual, Sun Life, and other financial firms. Ryan writes and edits AI industry trends and use-cases for Emerj's editorial and client content. Dick and Mac McDonald opened the first McDonald's restaurant in San Bernardino, California in 1940. By the end of the decade, the restaurant added its now-famous French fries. Ray Kroc joined the growing organization in 1954, purchased it in 1961, and served as its CEO into the early 1970s.

McDonald's has entered a strategic partnership with IBM to develop and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) technology that will help the fast-food giant automate its drive-thru lanes. According to the companies' joint statement about the partnership, the agreement will see IBM acquire McD Tech Labs which was created to advance employee and customer-facing innovations following McDonald's 2019 acquisition of Apprente. The IBM/McDonald's partnership will "accelerate McDonald's efforts to provide an even more convenient and unique customer and crew experience." The current technology was tested this summer at a handful of McDonald's locations in Chicago and according to the chain saw "substantial benefits" for both customers and staff, though with a roughly 85 percent accuracy does require some refinement. According to McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski, IBM's AI expertise thus makes them the "ideal partner" for the fast-food chain.

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.

There's creative AI and then there's the hard-working AI – the artificial intelligence that is able to replace humans in routine work, saving up costs and allowing the employees to take charge of more complex tasks. That is the AI McDonald's is already testing in drive-thrus in the U.S. and looking to implement on a larger scale soon. A few years ago, McDonald's started to test the technology in the hope that it might be ready one day to take over at drive-thru locations. They had help from Apprente, the startup that gave them the building blocks of the technology, enabling them to build their own voice assistant. Now, the AI system is in place at 10 drive-thrus in Chicago.

This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink. As if drive-through ordering wasn't frustrating enough already, now we might have a Siri-like AI to contend with. McDonald's just rolled out a voice recognition system at 10 drive-throughs in Chicago, expanding from the solitary test store they launched a few years ago. But when will it come to your neighborhood Golden Arches? "There is a big leap between going from 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S. with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather -- I mean, on and on and on and on," admitted McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski, reports Nation's Restaurant News.

The fast food giant has been testing out a Siri-like voice-recognition system at ten drive-thru locations in Chicago, CEO Chris Kempczinski revealed during a Wednesday investor conference attended by Nation's Restaurant News. The system can handle about 80 percent of the orders that come its way and fills them with about 85 percent accuracy -- probably annoying for the customers who just want to drive off with their burger -- but Kempczinski says a national rollout could happen in as soon as five years. It raises some interesting questions about the role that AI technology will play in various industries and, more importantly, the seemingly endless debate over whether raising the minimum wage to a livable salary will motivate CEOs to replace humans with machines -- or whether they'd do so to cut costs anyway. Part of the challenge in automating the drive-thru, Kempczinski said, is that human workers have been too eager to help out while supervising the technology that might one day replace them, preventing it from accruing the real-world data crucial for further improving the system. But as restaurant automation grows increasingly common, answering the question of how much responsibility a company has to continue employing people it could technically replace with machines will only grow more important and dire.

Next time you hit up a McDonald's drive-thru, you might find yourself leaning out your window to bark your order to a robot rather than a pimply teenager. The fast food giant has been testing out a Siri-like voice-recognition system at ten drive-thru locations in Chicago, CEO Chris Kempczinski revealed during a Wednesday investor conference attended by Nation's Restaurant News. The system can handle about 80 percent of the orders that come its way and fills them with about 85 percent accuracy -- probably annoying for the customers who just want to drive off with their burger -- but Kempczinski says a national rollout could happen in as soon as five years. It raises some interesting questions about the role that AI technology will play in various industries and, more importantly, the seemingly endless debate over whether raising the minimum wage to a livable salary will motivate CEOs to replace humans with machines -- or whether they'd do so to cut costs anyway. Part of the challenge in automating the drive-thru, Kempczinski said, is that human workers have been too eager to help out while supervising the technology that might one day replace them, preventing it from accruing the real-world data crucial for further improving the system.

Customers using the drive-thru at 10 McDonald's locations in Chicago are not ordering burgers and fries with human employees, but machines using artificial intelligence. The fast-food chain is testing voice recognition software at select locations that has shown to be 85 percent accurate – but 20 percent of orders need human intervention, CNBC reports. CEO Chris Kempczinski made the announcement Wednesday, but also explained that the software may not roll out to all of the fast-food chain's 14,000 locations. 'Now there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S., with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather -- and on and on and on,' Kempczinski said, per CNBC. The technology, according to McDonald's, aims to shorten the wait at the drive-thru by a yet to-be determined amount of time.