McDonald's

McDonald's Corporation is the largest quick-service restaurant company globally by system-wide sales and revenue from company-operated stores and franchise royalties. Founded in 1940 by Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California (with Ray Kroc joining as franchise agent in 1955 and acquiring the company in 1961), McDonald's trades on NYSE as MCD — making it one of the largest US-listed restaurant companies. The company operates approximately 41,000 restaurants in 100+ countries, with the bulk being franchised (~95%) rather than company-owned.

The McDonald's App (My McDonald's Rewards) has approximately 65 million members in the US and exceeds 175 million globally — making it one of the most-downloaded retail apps. The Loyalty program drives meaningful frequency lift and provides the company with rich first-party customer data. McDonald's digital and delivery channels (drive-thru, McDelivery, McDonald's App, kiosk in-store ordering) collectively account for over 50% of US transactions as of 2024.

McDonald's AI strategy has had significant publicly-discussed turbulence. The 2019 acquisition of Dynamic Yield (the Israeli personalization platform, acquired for approximately $300 million) was meant to drive AI-personalization at the drive-thru menu boards — Dynamic Yield was sold to Mastercard in 2022 after the original integration challenges. The IBM-partnered automated-drive-thru voice AI pilot was paused in 2024 after accuracy issues at the test stores. The 2024 Google Cloud partnership announcement (a multi-year strategic relationship covering AI-driven kitchen-equipment optimization, restaurant operations, and customer-experience workflows) represents the company's next AI strategic anchor. Internal AI applications include demand forecasting (food-ordering and labor-scheduling), customer-app personalization (powered by the post-Dynamic-Yield internal platform plus Google Cloud AI), and increasingly AI-augmented restaurant-operations playbook automation. Going forward, McDonald's AI focus areas include drive-thru voice AI (with vendors including Presto Voice and Hi Auto in pilot), kitchen automation, and continued mobile-app personalization.