News

McDonald's adds to tech arsenal with conversational tech acquisition

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September 10, 2019

McDonald's Corporation said today it will acquire voice-based conversational tech company, Apprente, adding to its growing toolkit of customer-facing tech capabilities. The announcement comes after extensive exploration with several parties, including evaluating Apprente's solutions in McDonald's test restaurants, according to a news release. 

The 2-year-old Apprente creates voice-based platforms for complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering. In McDonald's restaurants, this technology is expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order-taking at the drive thru with future potential to incorporate the capabilities into mobile ordering and kiosks. 

"Building our technology infrastructure and digital capabilities are fundamental to our Velocity Growth Plan and enable us to meet rising expectations from our customers, while making it simpler and even more enjoyable for crew members to serve guests," McDonald's President and CEO Steve Easterbrook, said in the release. "Apprente's gifted team, and the technology they have developed, will form McD Tech Labs, a new group integrated in our Global Technology team that will take our culture of innovation one step further." 

The Apprente team will be the founding member of a new, integrated, internal group within McDonald's Global Technology team called McD Tech Labs. Over time, McDonald's expects to grow its presence in Silicon Valley with the hiring of additional engineers, data scientists and other advanced technology experts, according to the release, who will join McD Tech Labs to meet future business needs and support deployment.

The latest investment builds on several key technology initiatives McDonald's has introduced in recent years to improve the employee and customer experience. In April, McDonald's acquired Dynamic Yield, a leader in personalization and decision logic technology, which is now deployed in over 8,000 restaurants in the U.S. with plans to be integrated into nearly all U.S. and Australia drive-thrus by the end of this year. 

McDonald's said it will use the decision technology to provide a more personalized customer experience by varying outdoor digital drive-thru menu displays to show food based on time of day, weather, current restaurant traffic and trending menu items. The decision technology can also instantly suggest and display additional items to a customer's order, based on their current selections. 

McDonald's also invested in Plexure, a mobile app vendor, earlier this year to further advance the development of McDonald's Global Mobile App.