Big Blue scoffs a Happy Meal: McDonald's sells automated order-taking tech to IBM Big Blue has taken a bite out of McDonald's, acquiring the burger chain's automated order taking (AOT) tech – and the "McD Tech Labs" that built it, for an undisclosed consideration that may or may not include an upsold serve of fries. The labs were created after Mickey Dee's 2019 acquisition of AI voice recognition startup …
Soon there will be no McHumans at any McD left. The McBurgers will be McRobotic. The McMilk will be McRobotic. All the Mc* will be McBotic, even stock up. The delivery vans are McAutomated selfMcDriving and the McBots will do the rest. McEtc...
When will McD serve excusively to McRobots? Or are the allegedly McMammalians driving along the McDrive already McRobots?
I do, kind of, petty the school dropouts. Soon they can no longer apply for a McD McJob.
Automation has long been expected to eliminate the vast majority of "drudge work" jobs, and as the food chain climbs higher and higher, more and more advanced tasks get viewed as expensive human-cost "drudge" to be automated.
To be honest, I've made a *career* out of putting myself and others out of work. I've always tried to deliver reliable solutions, not something that I can "milk for maintenance fees" down the road. When I say something is done, I want it to be DONE until there is a pile of cash and a contract for upgrades, not dribs and drabs of "The bean counter on aisle 32 wants the report shifted one line down and double spaced"
But you have to appreciate the irony of McD working on reducing and eliminating the bottom of the job market and replace it with few high skilled jobs outsourced to IBM.
Then questions pop up... Do the highly skilled workers dine at McD? Who can afford McD, if the bottom is out of a job?
Or any other distribution center, (FedEX, UPS, USPS, UK Mail, Deutsche Post, DHL etc....), also any import or export hall at your local international airport. We need not single handedly point to Amazon for this.
In any case I prefer Amazon over Fleebay, as they actually deliver, and in a timely matter, un like Flerebay that takes weeks, reports an Item as "Delivered", (and I'm still wondering where my Package is). SCREW FLEEBAY!
This is what happens when you demand "Life wages", for a zero skill job. Once upon a time a Menu (Burger, Fries, and Coke), was less than a fiver. Since then Germany implamented a minimum wage requirement, and now that same menu costs twice as muich. There is a price people are willing to pay for a crapy burger, and we hit it. Add to this the increasing bite of global inflation, negative intrest rates, the increeasing shortages of goods, and now slowly foodstuffs. I don't see a bright future for the burger flipping industry. unless they get rid of the human element.
Which, with upon further reflection, I would whole hartedly welcome. as
1) My order would hopefuly be fresh off the grill.
2) With less human fluids (i.e. Spit), in my food.
So yeah.... I welcome or Clowny-World robotic overlords.
Most McDoglins in the UK are now primarily based around touch screen self service kiosks so I’m not sure what the risk to jobs is. Perhaps those on the drive thru window?
Whilst the kiosks may have taken away jobs at the counter, there seem to have been new/different jobs created which involve taking food to tables for example.
Over here, the people taking the food to the table are the counter staff.
So why don't other fast-food companies work on improving their service? I'm stuck eating McDonald's because they're the only ones that can get my order even remotely right on a timescale less than an ice age.
Five Guys, In&Out, Steak'n'Shake, Burger King, Wendy's are just absolute shambling incompetents.
"Big Blue has taken a bite out of McDonald's, acquiring the burger chain's automated order taking (AOT) tech – and the McD Tech Labs that built it"
So there you have it, you have the ideal "IT departement" that even builds their own very successful point of sales devices and then you sell it for a onetime increase of your bottom line.
How short sighted can management be?
So, after a decade of investment in AI and cost cutting on everything else (except for Ginny's helicopter rides to the countryside), and losing money and value continuously in the process, they go and buy a quarter pound of AI in the drive-in?
... losing money and value continuously in the process, they go and buy a quarter pound of AI ...
Hmm ...
Maybe they're just doing a strictly local version the HP/Autonomy trick.
ie: write down ~ 75% of the reported undisclosed consideration before next year is here and then sue Ronald Mc Donald without the need of extraditing anyone.
I wonder if UBS, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America or Slaughter & May and Morgan Lewis had any say in all this?
O.
software from a artery hardening obesity generating firm bought by a shambling corporate arterial scholeric ruin of a firm downsized to a skeleton.
Now if the coffee would improve back to what it was ten years ago there would be something to buy in emergencies. As it is, I'd rather do without. @Flywheel, the maccas icecream machines are apparently a tale in themselves. Manglement at its finest.
Once IBM used to write good software. I still remember from middle 1990s the voice control of a laptop running AIX. Yes, IBM laptop running AIX natively. The voice control handled multiple accents in a very noisy echoing computer fair. To now buy stuff from a burger slinger suggests all the good management, let alone software engineers are long gone.
I played with that on the early 43P desktop systems with Ultimedia Services installed in about 1995,and I also had access to ThinkPad Power 850's when they became available, as we used them as Out-of-Hours laptops for the on-call specialists in the IBM AIX Suppport Centre (although the modem cards kept failing, we ended up using external modems for the dial up).
It really wasn't that sophisticated, although I have to admit that I was only using the voice control aspects of CDE, but I wasn't that impressed (down, down, click). I had seen similar technology over the preceding 10 years, using various hardware assists on things as humble as the BBC Micro (although that was using a custom Fast Fourier Analysis piece of kit for the hashing of the words, which the BEEB then looked up in a simple database).
Shortly after voice control of AIX systems, there were multiple voice recognition systems for PC's running Windows. I remember Dragon Naturally Speaking and IBM's own Via Voice, but there were others.
But it took until Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft built natural speech recognition into consumer devices for this technology to really take off. That was a very long 10 years (something that seemed to always be the expected timeline) from the early 1980s to actually come to fruition.
I would have liked to see the technology for local speech recognition to have happened, however, rather than having it shipped out to the cloud for processing. Even an Amazon Echo Dot has more processing power than the hardware that started doing reliable voice recognition in the 1980/1990s. Maybe it was only the data harvesting capabilities that served as the final enabler for this technology.
Once you had trained it to your particular voice, and learned to speak with clear...gaps...between...the...words, Via Voice was perfectly usable on a 486 under OS/2.
The way similar sounding words changed as the context became clear was impressive.
How many times more powerful is a modern smartphone over a 486/100? This never needed to be remotely "processed," it's just a way to better target advertising, or general spying on their users.
Remember that IBM package to add voice recogntion to your pc? Naturally speaking...?
Back then, it would hamper a Pentium 100 MHz performance, but today...
I wanna see this system botching up your orders, and they having to rejig the entire system to show the order in WRITING before accepting the yelled order over a windy day and noisy traffic.
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