Dive Brief:
- McDonald's SVP and U.S. CIO Valerie Ashbaugh will depart at the end of April, the company said in a Tuesday announcement. The executive is leaving after less than a year as CIO, ending a five-year stint at the fast food company across several leadership roles.
- In a message to employees, Global CIO Brian Rice and U.S. COO Skye Anderson praised Ashbaugh's work to transform the company's consumer and restaurant platforms and bolster the company's technology organization.
- Mustafa Husain, former VP of restaurant technology engineering, will replace Ashbaugh starting May 1. The executive led innovation and engineering for the company's global restaurant platform and focused on improving the company's crew-facing systems, including the point-of-sale platform.
Dive Insight:
The leadership move at McDonald's comes as it continues a transformation journey dubbed Accelerating the Arches, rolled out at the end of 2020 and renewed for a second phase in 2023.
The company is making progress on revamping its technology backbone, a key component to the growth-boosting effort, said President and CEO Chris Kempczinski, speaking in February during the company's Q4 2025 earnings call.
"When we started this journey, from a company standpoint, we didn't have a global business services function. Today we do," said Kempczinski. "We didn't have [a] revenue growth management function. Now we do. We didn't have a standardized global tech stack. Today, we're close."
The company reported just over $27 billion in revenues during the 2025 fiscal year, up 4% from the prior year.
McDonald's push to upgrade the company's IT infrastructure also comes as the business puts active loyalty members at the center of its digital initiatives.
“When you have the ability to get every market onto a common tech stack, our ability to move with speed and to deploy solutions gets increased by factors of significant numbers,” Kempczinski said in February.
The restaurant sector has been busy bringing technology up to speed. Earlier this month, Shake Shack rolled out Project Catalyst, an effort to overhaul its tech stack in pursuit of AI adoption and upgraded systems. Yum Brands, parent company to KFC and Taco Bell, partnered with Nvidia last year in an effort to infuse AI into its operations.
More than one-quarter of restaurant operators globally are already using AI at their restaurants, according to a report from the National Restaurant Association. Marketing, administrative tasks and customer ordering are some of the key use cases.
