McDonald's to 'double down' on AI investment

HYDERABAD, Aug 5 (Reuters): McDonald's plans to "double down" on its artificial intelligence investments by 2027 and is betting on India to be a key hub for data governance, engineering and platform architecture, a senior executive said on Friday.

The fast-food giant, which entered India in 1996, operates hundreds of restaurants across the country and recently set up a global office in the southern city of Hyderabad, with an aim to make it the largest outside the United States.

"We're still in the early stages, so it's hard to pin down the exact investment," McDonald's head of Global Business Services operations, Deshant Kaila, said in an interview on the sidelines of an event in Hyderabad.

McDonald's is using AI to verify orders at 400 restaurants to pre-empt errors before handing them over to customers, and expects to roll this out to 40,000 locations globally by 2027, Durga Prakash, head of technology (global offices), said.