Mention McDonald’s to someone today, and they're more likely to think about Big Mac than Big Data. But that could soon change: The fast-food giant has embraced machine learning, in a fittingly super-sized way.

McDonald’s is set to announce that it has reached an agreement to acquire Dynamic Yield, a startup based in Tel Aviv that provides retailers with algorithmically driven "decision logic" technology. When you add an item to an online shopping cart, it’s the tech that nudges you about what other customers bought as well. Dynamic Yield reportedly had been recently valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars; people familiar with the details of the McDonald’s offer put it at over $300 million. That would make it the company's largest purchase since it acquired Boston Market in 1999.

The burger giant can certainly afford it; in 2018 alone it tallied nearly $6 billion of net income, and ended the year with a free cash flow of $4.2 billion. But that still doesn’t address the bigger question of why. For that, you have to head to the drive-thru.

Drive Time

McDonald’s serves around 68 million customers every single day. The majority of those people never get out of their car, opting instead to place and pick up their orders at the drive-thru window. And that’s where McDonald’s will deploy Dynamic Yield first.

McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook McDonald's

Over the last several years, you may have noticed that the displays as you approach the McDonald’s drive-through—and inside the restaurant, for that matter—have gone digital. That’s just one of several significant, data-focused investments that both McDonald’s and its franchisees have made since CEO Steve Easterbrook took the helm in 2015. The company also launched an app and partnered with Uber Eats in that time, in addition to making a number of infrastructure improvements. It even relocated its headquarters less than a year ago from the suburbs to Chicago’s vibrant West Town neighborhood, in a bid to attract young talent.

Look at the Dynamic Yield acquisition, then, not as the start of a digital transformation, but as the catalyst that evolves it.

“What we hadn’t done is begun to connect the technology together, and get the various pieces talking to each other,” says Easterbrook, in an exclusive interview with WIRED. “How do you transition from mass marketing to mass personalization? To do that, you’ve really got to unlock the data within that ecosystem in a way that’s useful to a customer.”

Here’s what that looks like in practice: When you drive up to place your order at a McDonald’s today, a digital display greets you with a handful of banner items or promotions. As you inch up toward the ordering area, you eventually get to the full menu. Both of these, as currently implemented, are largely static, aside from the obvious changes like rotating in new offers, or switching over from breakfast to lunch.

But in a pilot program at a McDonald’s restaurant in Miami, powered by Dynamic Yield, those displays have taken on new dexterity. Algorithms crunch data as diverse as the weather, time of day, local traffic, nearby events, and of course historical sales data, both at that specific franchise and around the world. In the new McDonald’s machine-learning paradigm, significant display real estate goes toward showing customers what other items have been popular at that location, and prompting them with potential upsells. Thanks for your Happy Meal order; maybe you’d like a Sprite to go with it.

“We’ve never had an issue in this business with a lack of data,” says Easterbrook. “It’s drawing the insight and the intelligence out of it.”