McDonald's partners with IBM in providing more drive-through lanes

Fast-food giant McDonald's is partnering with IBM to add more automated drive-through lanes to more locations to minimize human mistakes and cut costs with fewer humans on its payroll.

While automation has a big upfront cost, it makes operations much cheaper than hiring human workers.

With the automated service, customers can input complicated orders into their gadgets and get the right product.

Customers also tend to order more when they don't have to verbalize what they're getting to another person.

McDonald's eliminates the shame factor by letting customers order digitally for delivery and via kiosks.

Thus, McDonald's made ordering at kiosks and building out mobile ordering via its app a key part of its Experience of the Future program.