McDonald's has signed a multi-year agreement with Google Cloud Platform for the former to use Google's hardware, data, and AI at its restaurants.
The partnership will see McDonald's using Google Cloud's technologies at thousands of its restaurants worldwide.
The company will use Edge computing solutions from Google, deploying the Google Distributed Cloud on-premise at its restaurants.
McDonald's will be able to use this to analyze how equipment is performing and find solutions that will reduce business disruption.
It is also hoped that McDonald's will be able to improve its restaurant and customer platforms including the mobile app and self-service kiosks at a much faster rate via cloud computing.
“We see tremendous opportunity for growth in our digital business and our partnership with Google Cloud allows us to capitalize on this by leveraging our size and scale to build capabilities and implement solutions at unmatched speeds,” said Brian Rice, McDonald’s EVP and global CIO.
“Connecting our restaurants worldwide to millions of data points 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.”
In addition to the Edge computing deployments, a dedicated Google Team in Chicago will be working with McDonald's global innovation center known as Speedee Labs, using generative AI to find solutions to "key business priorities," details of which were not provided.
“Through this wide-ranging partnership, Google Cloud will help McDonald’s seize on new opportunities to transform its business and customer experiences, empowering restaurants worldwide with the latest technologies for near-term impact,” said Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO.
“Pairing the iconic brand, size, and scale of McDonald’s with Google Cloud’s deep history in AI and technology innovation will redefine how this industry works and what people expect when they dine out.”
McDonald's was in the midst of moving to the cloud in 2018 according to an article by CIO Dive. At the time, the company had selected to go "all in" on AWS native services for its core workloads as part of a five-year transition, with some going to Microsoft Azure.
DCD has reached out to McDonald's to find out how this new deal with Google Cloud affects this. A later interview with Joel Eagle, senior director of cloud and data services, confirmed that "everything in corporate McDonalds is now in the Cloud."
