Software isn't just eating the world, it's changing the places where you eat

I had the pleasure of participating in Fortune’s Brainstorm TECH conference last week, and joining a very timely panel discussion on whether Moore’s Law applies to the physical world, whether it be humans providing service or the physical spaces that retailers like McDonald’s possess on a massive scale.

For those of you not familiar with it, the Fortune conference is an annual gathering of heads from global companies, top startups and forward thinking investors. I like to run ideas and assumptions past the people most actively disrupting the consumer space, and find this event a very efficient way to do that over the course of a packed day at the event.

Kudos to Clifton Leaf, the Fortune editor who crafted such an awesome and timely topic. Think about it for a moment. We all know that Moore’s Law has created massive change in the software space- allowing you to do everything from taking amazing pictures and keeping a library of them on your smartphone, to making gaming experience life like. But it doesn’t stop there. The real world is being shaped by the application of technology to physical experiences.

Marc Andreesen famously coined the phrase “software is eating the world” and Moore’s Law applied to the real world is exactly what’s driving that. McDonald’s is a great proof point and indicator for this. How so? We have large numbers of people coming to our restaurants each day going through a common journey to accomplish a task. As technology makes it way into the customer’s hands, we’ve had to evolve our service model and how we organize the customer experience. 

Take for example, self-service kiosks – something McDonald’s introduced years ago in a variety of countries as the hardware / software became feasible to embrace. We found these customer-controlled order points were an important option for restaurants with high arrival rates at peak times. They’ve helped us increase the number of order points, reducing “lines” and de-stressing the customer journey, all while empowering customers in the process. To make self ordering work, we’ve had to evolve the role of our people (service staff) and the layout of our physical spaces. Our restaurant service staff often are stationed alongside kiosks to greet and help customers – a hospitality focus that allows for a better experience.

And we haven’t stopped there. As customers order from the kiosks, we now make good use of their time by allowing them to take a seat and have food brought to the table. This kind of table service or table fulfillment option has implications for staff training, service experience and technology (think location awareness). The traffic patterns in the restaurant change and our restaurant design teams develop ways to make customer flow more intuitive. We all appreciate good navigation in the design of an app. The physical world is heading in the same direction.

As new technologies come down the line, we’re going to continue to make pivots in how our real world experience works. Mobile ordering is something we’ve been piloting in places like the UK and China (with an eye to bring it to more of McDonald’s). And we’ve been thinking about how that changes customer flow in the future. For example, what if large numbers of people craft their orders and take care of payment even before they arrive at the restaurant? If they want to dine-in, will they go directly to a table and expect us to bring the food like we have in place for some of our kiosk based experiences?   And what about ordering dessert or adding onto your meal after your initial order was brought to the table? Customers may find it very convenient to add to their tab from the comfort of their seats as opposed to going through the buying process from scratch again.

Our business is not the only one facing substantial opportunity to innovate around real world experience. One of my favorite examples is the automotive business. We read a lot about autonomous cars but don’t forget there is a ton of disruption about to take place in the buying experience. Consider that you can provision the horsepower of a Telsa with the cloud. What does that do to the retail buying experience and role of the showroom sales person? Your choice around the spec of the vehicle is no longer contained to the day you buy the car. The features of your car can get upgraded over the top at a later point in time. The service model at dealerships will need to change quite a bit to reflect this.

My panel included a number of really bright thinkers on the subject and here’s a small sample of insights that I wanted to share with you: 

Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt Hotels, shared important insight around authenticity and personalization when it comes to people interactions. He rightly observed, “People want authenticity, not perfection. Authenticity beats perfection every time.”   Hyatt has a ton of innovations going on around guest experience and Mark is clearly a customer-obsessed executive who gets it.

April Underwood, Vice President of Product at Slack, discussed that balance is key in providing smart service that is both immediate but also emphatic. At Slack, they are at work on bots which can provide human-like interactions with AI being the next step, but all the while working to ensure a human layer to intervene if something doesn’t go right.

David Stern, former Commissioner of the NBA, discussed the NBA’s use of messenger bots for customer service: “We initiated messenger bots for customer service that asked what player highlights you would want to see? Bots give us the ability to respond to those questions.”

When discussing customer service in the age of social media, Christa Quarles, CEO of OpenTable, elaborated on the need to use data to anticipate problems and create action.

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There’s so much coming down the pipe for all of our businesses – AI, VR, messaging, drones, and more. Just further evidence that Moore’s Law is about to radically influence how we organize and experience real world services.

-Atif Rafiq | McDonald’s Global Chief Digital Officer | @atifatif