{"id":2898,"date":"2019-04-25T00:36:04","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T22:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/?p=2898"},"modified":"2019-04-25T00:38:52","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T22:38:52","slug":"two-bigmacs-and-big-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/two-bigmacs-and-big-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Two BigMac’s and one Big Data along, please."},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally, we got on turn in the queue. “Two Big Macs and one Big Data\u00a0along it, please,” says my colleague nonchalantly. The girl behind the counter is obviously stunned, her glance jumps alternately\u00a0from one of us to another. She is balancing somewhere between misheard the second part of the order\u00a0or\u00a0worried that she had\u00a0not yet studied the entire menu of the restaurant properly. Then she gently flushes and nods in confirmation. With huge effort we fight back laughter to keep us from revealing.<\/p>\n

– – –<\/p>\n

\"McDonalds_BigMac\"This was a joke<\/strong> that we tried a few years back at one of our McDonald’s visits. Putting Big Mac and Big Data into context was really a prank. How\u00a0it finally worked out you will find out at the very end of this blog. However, what served to be teasing\u00a0joke back then is no longer laughable today. Even as straightforward business, as\u00a0 fast-food undoubtedly is,\u00a0starts to discover the nooks of data analysts and\u00a0applications of\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/span>.<\/p>\n

According to WIRED<\/u><\/a><\/span>, this fast-food giant has decided to buy Israeli firm\u00a0Dynamic Yield<\/u><\/a><\/span>, which specializes in machine learning algorithms supporting Sales and Customer service<\/strong>. If the bare essence of the message has not raised your eyebrows, I add that this is the biggest acquisition McDonald\u2019s has done over the past 20 years. Backstage expert information suggests that Dynamic Yield\u00a0price was\u00a0north $ 300 million, or about 7% of McDonald’s worldwide cash flow or 5% of global annual revenue for the past year! For comparison, it’s about as much as it costs them to build restaurants for all the Scandinavian countries combined<\/a>. Perhaps, some of you will shake your head: What does McDonald’s sees in\u00a0artificial intelligence,\u00a0so that it is willing to “throw” such huge money on it?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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While McDonald’s products are so standardized that\u00a0they are often\u00a0perceived as\u00a0the cornerstone of simplicity,\u00a0 you might wonder what is it there in McDonald’s business to analyze in such a depth. Some would fall for usual suspects of optimizing inventory logistics or the efficiency of hamburger\u00a0and fries roasting.<\/span>\u00a0At least this is how we, the customers, see McDonald’s from behind the counter.<\/span>\u00a0Therefore, I bet you\u00a0may be surprised, that the real reason for fast-food to\u00a0chew\u00a0into sophisticated analytics\u00a0is the bare\u00a0customer data<\/strong>.<\/span> As\u00a0McDonald’s is still severely limited by the physical number of different products it can offer you (contrary\u00a0to Amazon, for example), client data is not primary helpful to make yet another upgrades\u00a0or new versions of burgers.<\/span> The way\u00a0that they reported using Dynamic Yield technology is surprising different.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

McDonald’s seeming data analytics bonanza is a drive-thru process<\/strong>. (…, which is not the focus of sales in most of the Europe, but is an important share of the overall market in the core Western\"McDonalds_DriveThrough\" markets. Thus, Big Data\u00a0might not find immediate\u00a0use in our region for some month, but in the US it has dire consequences). You may have noticed that most of the offers and promo banners in McDonal’s restaurant chain has lately\u00a0 been transformed into digital displays. This change allows not only to speed up the exchange of new offers for the old ones, but allows also to personalize the offer for a particular customer. Certainly, with standard ordering directly at the counter in the restaurant, it doesn’t make sense because the “personalized” offer would confuse other clients waiting in the queue. But in drive-in it is all possible. So how will it all work?<\/p>\n

Upon approaching the\u00a0drive-through, their system attempts to recognize which customer it actually is. There\u00a0are, metter-of-factly already several\u00a0 alternatives to do so: recognizing of car number-plate, beacons\u00a0fishing for your mobile device, credit card details, or at least unique enough combination of products you order. By identifying (or estimating) your identity, the system will then take advantage of the time you are\u00a0waiting (for\u00a0order to fulfill) and by using local weather data, info on nearby events and current menu item popularity of items, you have not spontaneously added\u00a0to your order,\u00a0\u00a0will offer you personalized coupons (which can be turned into purchase extension via one-touch purchase).\u00a0What is more, if the system recognizes you before placing the order, it can even incorporate factors like duration meal preparation (to\u00a0match your (in)patience\u00a0profile), or the relative length of the\u00a0queue versus the standard you experienced in similar part of the day in past.<\/p>\n

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However\u00a0“banal” this might sound to you,\u00a0properly personalized UP-sell offers normally\u00a0achieve a 3-7% success rate<\/strong>. McDonald’s averages 68 million<\/strong> clients served per day. Adding to that fact that by speeding up McDonald’s own service might prevent some customers dropping from a slow-moving car queue, one can easily imagine that a 5% return on sales can be achieved almost instantaneously. Moreover, as the number of generated client coupon grows, the system\u00a0learns to be increasingly targeted (and therefore more successful).\u00a0If any benefits can be materialized from servicing (with AI help) \u201cnon-motorized\u201d customers\u00a0 inside the restaurant will be\u00a0extra joker card of this project. Though\u00a0face recognition systems are already tool in retail, so it will be not long before they prove their might in regular counter-serving of hungry guests. The greasy, fast-food\u00a0mass production, as McDonald\u2019s often see, is seemingly moving into a new era. Who would have expected so just\u00a0a couple of years back?<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

– – –<\/p>\n

Laughter finally beat us. We had tried our best to stay calm, but when the order tray landed in front of us, we couldn’t stand it anymore and burst into laughter. There were large fries laying besides the two big burgers. We quickly grabbed the burgers, leaving the ordering\u00a0colleague with long, Big Potatoes instead of lunch. Well, he\u00a0deserved\u00a0it, after all. He ordered Big Data few years too early.<\/p>\n

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Finally, we got on turn in the queue. “Two Big Macs and one Big Data\u00a0along it, please,” says my colleague nonchalantly. The girl behind the counter is obviously stunned, her…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2883,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2011,26,1456,1462,1459,1451,1457,1460,1458,237,1446,1461,1453],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/McDonalds.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2898"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2902,"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898\/revisions\/2902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mocnedata.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}