Fortune 500 CEOs don’t shy away from flexing all of the ways their companies have implemented AI to make work more efficient and productivity more prevalent. However, CEOs have lives outside of the boardroom (or so we’re told) and are increasingly using AI tools to not only make their professional but also personal lives easier.
Kempczinski said he even used AI to craft his family’s Christmas card photo this year because as his kids have gotten older and live in different places, it’s gotten too hard to get everyone together all at once to snap a photo.
“And of course,” joked Kempczinski, “it’s impossible to get the dog to pose.”
“And voila—we had our Christmas card,” he said.
The CEO isn’t just using AI for fun—he’s turning to it to improve the very items you’d find on the menu. Kempczinski said he’s used Gemini to research global food trends and asked it to compare them to the McDonald’s menu to look for any recommendations for “menu innovation” that would work in the U.S. on a limited-time basis.
Gemini recommended McDonald’s experiment with McRib Nuggets and more Korean sauces for nuggets and burgers, the CEO said.
“I threw those [ideas] to the menu team. Who knows what they’re going to do with it, maybe nothing,” Kempczinski said. But “maybe something.”
Kempczinski has also said he wants AI to reshape McDonald’s operations, using data from 150 million people in its digital ecosystem and up to 70 million transactions per day to build a smarter, more personalized experience.
But in his personal life, Altman said he used it to help research parenthood before he and his husband, Australian software engineer Oliver Mulherin, welcomed their baby boy in February 2025.
