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McDonald’s plans to “double down” on its artificial intelligence investments by 2027 and is betting on India to be a key hub for data governance, engineering and platform architecture, a senior executive said on Friday. The fast-food giant, which entered India in 1996, operates hundreds of restaurants across the country and recently set up a global office in the southern city of Hyderabad, with an aim to make it the largest outside the United States. “We’re still in the early stages, so it’s hard to pin down the exact investment,” McDonald’s head of Global Business Services operations, Deshant Kaila, said in an interview on the sidelines of an event in Hyderabad. McDonald’s is using AI to verify orders at 400 restaurants to pre-empt errors before handing them over to customers, and expects to roll this out to 40,000 locations globally by 2027, Durga Prakash, head of technology (global offices), said. The fast-food giant is also using AI tools to forecast sales, decide on pricing and assess product performance and is building a personalised app, which would work across countries, according to Kaila. He said the India push will centre on building its AI team, but added that spending will lean more toward technology and tools, not headcount. The company is in talks to set up a global office in Poland, just like the ones in India and Mexico, according to Durga Prakash. Earlier this year, the southern Indian state of Telangana said that McDonald’s would launch a global capability center, employing 2,000 people in Hyderabad. India’s global capability centers, once low-cost outsourcing hubs for global corporations, have evolved to support their parent organisations in domains ranging from operations and finance to research and development. Rishika Sadam, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Midsize cities are where the growth is. Thats according to new report from BILL, the payments management company used by nearly half a million small and medium-size businesses and that processes around 1% of U.S. GDP. The report analyzed business-to-business accounts payable spending of companies with between 2 and 200 employees from the largest 342 U.S. cities with a population of 100,000 or more. Heres what to know: While payments per company from large cities grew 11% year-over-year during the 12-month period ending May 2025, midsize cities have grown 32% over the same period. Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, the growth in payments per company from midsize cities is two times that of large cities. While growth in midsize cities has increased by 200%, large cities growth escalated by just 113%. Since January 2025, one month before the introduction of new tariffs, midsize cities have outpaced payments growth from large cities by nearly three times, with payments in large cities growing by 1.9% and midsize cities growing 5.5% in payment volume per business. Below are the five U.S. cities with the fastest growing payments this year. All five are midsize cites. 1. Mesquite, Texas 2. El Monte, California 3. South Fulton, Georgia 4. Quincy, Massachusetts 5. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma BILL Chief Economist Fergus McCormick says hes never seen this trend before. Through the data from May, were seeing really strong growth and resilience among SMBs in midsize cities, he says. Thats the key message. The South and West regions of the U.S. have seen the fastest payments growth by city. This trend in data follows the exodus of people from larger cities during Covid-19, when an estimated 2 million migrated to the South and 957,000 to the West. According to the report, midsize cities in California and Texas saw the highest payments growth since May 2024. Those two states are also home to nine of the 25 fastest-growing cities this year, all midsize. Other factors drawing people to midsize cities include a lower cost of living, stronger schools, safer neighborhoods and the increased regularity of working remotely. McCormick says we are truly in the era of the midsize city. This payments data is a leading indicator of economic activity across the United States, he says. To the extent that we can help people understand the trends in economic activity, that is absolute gold. By Ava Levinson This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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E-Commerce
Figmas initial public offering this week was a boon for investors. Well, some investors. When shares of the design software startup started trading on Thursday, they immediately went to the moon. After being priced at $33, the stock closed at $115.50 a share, an increase of around 250%. That meant some serious returns for investors, at least the ones who were able to get in on the action. But complaints and reports surfaced yesterday among some Robinhood users who say missed out, as they were not able to purchase as much Figma stock as they wouldve liked. Several users took to social media to air their grievances, claiming that they had tried to buy many Figma shares when they hit the market via Robinhood, but were only granted a single share. For instance, one user, posting on X, claimed to receive only one share after requesting 3,000. The issue sparked a number of memes throughout the day on Thursday as Figma’s blockbuster IPO dominated financial headlines. mom, how are we so rich?your dad sold his 1 figma share robinhood allocated him in the $fig ipo pic.twitter.com/FR96C4IxeT— Alex Kehr (@alexkehr) July 31, 2025 It may have happened because Robinhood, like other trading platforms, only receives a certain number of shares when a company goes public. We receive a limited number of shares for each IPO, reads an article from Robinhoods support team. We use the number of shares, customer demand, and other factors to determine how many shares you’ll get. You may get the full number of shares you requested, a partial amount, or none at all. So Robinhood does make it fairly clear that just because a user is requesting shares, it doesnt mean that theyll necessarily get them. In this case, as demand outstripped supplylikely exceedingly sothe company may have had to divvy the stock out accordingly, regardless of how many users actually requested. Fast Company has reached out to Robinhood for comment and clarification. A few days before Figmas listing on Thursday, Bloomberg reported that its IPO was approaching 40 times oversubscribed, reflecting what was largely expected to be enormous demand for the stock. Robinhood has drawn the ire of users in the past due to concerns around the limited trading of certain stocks. Notably, it happened in 2021, when the platform restricted purchases of GameStop and AMC shares (among others) during the so-called meme stock rally. But the Figma IPO is perhaps another example of how retail investors, relative to institutional investors, can end up getting the short end of the stick. There may not be much that investors can do about that, but for those who missed out on Figma’s IPO price, its a reminder that access to the marketsas a retail investor using a trading app or platformmay not be as unfettered or democratic as wed like to think. Figma shares opened even higher on Friday, at one point hitting close to $143.
Category:
E-Commerce
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