🍟 THE GOLDEN ARCHES PULLED UP TO THE PODCAST 🍟

Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with Zachary Richard, Senior Director of Data Science at McDonald's. If you've ever wondered what it looks like when the world's most recognized restaurant brand puts serious firepower behind data and AI... this is the episode for you.

📺WATCH AND LEARN📺

👉 How Zach helped build McDonald's data science function from the ground up - including the messy reality of centralizing analytics inside a 75-year-old, heavily franchised global organization where even basic data like "does this location have a drive-thru?" wasn't always reliably available

👉 Why McDonald's treats its business as a three-legged stool of customers, crew, and corporate - and the hard lesson Zach's team had to learn about why the math alone will never be enough to move the needle at scale

👉 The surprising insight hiding inside McDonald's AI drive-thru data: it's not just an ops play. Voice AI can generate a never-before-available direct signal into customer behavior - what people order, what they ask for when it's unavailable, and whether LTO availability windows are actually calibrated correctly

👉 Why Zach believes the real long-term value of generative AI isn't just the solution you deploy - it's the novel data that gets created as a result, and how smart operators will use that data to drive decisions across menu, marketing, and supply chain

👉 The edge computing vision Zach is most excited about: AI-powered crew enablement tools that let a crew member snap a photo of a broken piece of equipment and instantly get the exact fix they need - right on their phone, without leaving the floor

👉 Why Small Language Models (SLMs) may outperform large ones for restaurant ops - and Zach's bold prediction that in two to three years, agile 10-20 unit operators could actually have a technological edge over the big chains

👉 The one restaurant tech trend Zach thinks the industry is sleeping on and why the ROI math and the all-or-nothing mindset of large chains is holding it back

➕ PLUS: Rapid fire! Zach's go-to McDonald's order and his prediction on whether a human will still be taking orders at the front counter in 2035.

➕➕ PLUS PLUS: Shoutout to Zeke, Zach's 15-year-old deaf dog who made a surprise cameo mid-interview by jumping onto the couch behind him. 🐶 Legend.

Thank you, Zach! One of the most substantive conversations we've had on the show. If you care about where AI is headed in QSR - not the hype, but the reality - this one's a must-watch. 🚀