McDonald's will fire all drive-thru employees and replace them with robots
Today we are talking about artificial intelligence, which may soon take people many jobs in one of the most popular fast food restaurants.
Would you rather talk to a human or a robot when ordering food? McDonald's assumes that it's definitely the latter. That is why they decided to buy Apprente, a company founded in 2017, which deals with AI voice platforms for comprehensive, multilingual and multi-element ordering. As you can guess, the robots will get a job in drive thru, because McDonald’s believes that it will facilitate, speed up and organize ordering.
Apprente claims that, unlike competing solutions, their platform does not record what the client has said and does not draw conclusions from transcription, but goes straight from signal to result. This is to significantly improve results in naturally noisy environments, such as restaurants, where in addition people benefit from colloquialisms and a greatly simplified language structure.
We would also like to remind you that this is McDonald's second AI purchase this year, because in March the company announced plans to acquire Dynamic Yield for over USD 300 million, a start-up operating in the field of machine learning that uses predictive algorithms to create personalized recommendations. It works in cooperation with the digital menu of restaurants, actively responding to factors such as weather, time of day, movement in a specific place or fashionable dishes and displaying advertisements for appropriate dishes and drinks.
Dynamic Yields technology already operates in more than 8,000 American McDonald’s restaurants, and by the end of the year is expected to power almost all drive thru in the United States and Australia, in order to continue expanding around the world in the following years. As for the Apprente voice platform, in this case we didn't know any specific dates, but knowing the company policy we can soon expect tests in limited areas, which will probably determine whether the solution will permanently go to popular restaurants.
If you follow up our news about artificial intelligence and futurism, you should already caught the point that in the near future robots will be standard in many sectors. All the factories, restaurants, cafes, and many other places will be replaced by robots. Sure, there must be humans as well, to control or help them. But still the number of humans will be getting much lower than before.
There are some advantages and disadvantages of having robots in our life. That’s normal. Hopefully we will mostly use the advantages of them to not change the world into hell. Having a robot in a factory is something great that you can produce your products faster and more efficiently. However, humans must be located somewhere in the factory to not lose the control.
Maybe, robots will be only workers, and humans will be at the marketing, branding, administration or IT departments. So, humans will be representing the company, and robots will be working for humans.
But when it comes to McDonald's, the situation is a little different than others. Even now, you can go and order your burger via their kiosks. It saves your time, and then less people work at that restaurant.
Hopefully we will see and use the advantage part of this renovation with the robotics technology.