McDonald’s will deploy ArchIQ, an artificial intelligence-powered restaurant operating system, across its network, with U.S. rollout starting in 2027. Its drive-thru voice agent, Archy, takes orders in English and Spanish with accuracy above 90%, Bloomberg reported. The company told investors at its Sept. 23 investor day in Chicago that Archy will free at least 50 labor hours per restaurant each week as it scales. Both figures are the company’s own and unaudited.
Archy does more than answer questions. It hears a spoken request, builds the basket, shows the customer a total and passes the order to the payment window. Brian Rice, McDonald’s executive vice president and global chief information officer, said the agent “frees our crew to focus on hospitality and driving growth.”
McDonald’s Tries Voice AI Again, This Time Beyond the Speaker
McDonald’s has been here before. It ended a drive-thru voice test with IBM in 2024 after running it in more than 100 restaurants, CNBC reported at the time. That system struggled with accents and dialects. It was also a standalone order taker. ArchIQ first surfaced at the company’s Worldwide Convention in June, PYMNTS reported, as a Google-powered system running in five test restaurants that had already cleared 1 million transactions. The new platform now reaches the kitchen, the stockroom and the bag.
Automated inventory tracks stock in real time through Bluetooth Low Energy tags, which Rice said will save about five labor hours per week and cut food waste by 15%. Connected equipment and computer vision track food quality and consistency and move equipment management to predictive alerts, he said. He put the gain in key equipment and menu availability at about 50% per restaurant.
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
Verification happens before the food leaves. Accuracy Scales verify millions of orders a day, and crew catch and correct 10% of them before they reach the customer, Rice said. McDonald’s has the scales in more than 10,000 restaurants and plans to double that by 2028. The scales, which were created in France, cut delivery refunds and free drive-thru capacity at peak hours, he said.
Edge Hardware Carries the Load
Archy runs on Google edge computers installed inside restaurants, which puts AI computing power on site rather than in a distant data center. McDonald’s has deployed that hardware to thousands of restaurants across seven major markets and expects to finish the U.S. rollout in 2027. It has also unified its point-of-sale systems across nearly all markets and built a single data lake tied to restaurant operations. That lake captures billions of data points daily from more than 46,000 restaurants.
Rivals moved faster on voice and hit the same wall. Yum Brands moved to expand Taco Bell’s voice AI from about 100 drive-thrus to hundreds in 2024, PYMNTS reported. A year later, with the system in more than 500 U.S. drive-thrus, Taco Bell said it was rethinking where to use it after viral videos showed customers pranking the system, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Franchisees Carry the Bill
ArchIQ is the productivity engine inside a larger plan the company calls NEXT. McDonald’s committed about $8.5 billion in franchisee support through 2036, including about $5 billion by 2030 to speed deployment of ArchIQ technology bundles and kitchen upgrades. The company targets about 250 basis points of gross restaurant-level efficiency, equal to roughly $100,000 in annual cash flow for the average U.S. restaurant. It expects about a four-year payback for franchisees after that support.
The full set of upgrades will cost about $800,000 per U.S. restaurant on top of a standard remodel of $400,000 to $450,000 that franchisees fund themselves, CNBC reported.
For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.
Add as Preferred Source
