By Rishika Sadam

HYDERABAD, Aug 1 (Reuters) - 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.

(Reporting by Rishika Sadam, Chandini Monnappa and Praveen

Paramasivam; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala)