I didn’t see anything impressive (from a technical perspective) about any of this. $300 million seems embarrassingly high, but I bet it’s reallllllllly hard to convince a bunch of smart ML/AI people to work for McDonalds. The “we’re staying independent” and “we’re staying scrappy” stuff is a cringe. No, I’m sorry, but actually you just run a kinda cool department of McDonalds now. Have fun (& make peace!) with optimizing the drive thru.
Last thing. Backwards sentences like this make me crazy: “While customer satisfaction may be the goal, the avenues McDonald’s takes to get there will increase revenues along the way.” No. No no no. Revenues are the goal. And customer satisfaction gets you there. To suggest the inverse is double-speak.
I didn’t see anything impressive (from a technical perspective) about any of this. $300 million seems embarrassingly high, but I bet it’s reallllllllly hard to convince a bunch of smart ML/AI people to work for McDonalds. The “we’re staying independent” and “we’re staying scrappy” stuff is a cringe. No, I’m sorry, but actually you just run a kinda cool department of McDonalds now. Have fun (& make peace!) with optimizing the drive thru.
Last thing. Backwards sentences like this make me crazy: “While customer satisfaction may be the goal, the avenues McDonald’s takes to get there will increase revenues along the way.” No. No no no. Revenues are the goal. And customer satisfaction gets you there. To suggest the inverse is double-speak.