McDonald’s CEO is a ‘supersubscriber’ of AI tools—and even used it to photoshop all his kids into a Christmas card

Take McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, for example, who described himself in an Instagram reel published last week as a “supersubscriber to every AI tool out there.”

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.” 

That’s why he used Nano Banana, Google Gemini’s AI image generator and photo editor, to digital cajole his family together for a Christmas card. He uploaded individual photos of each member of the family, and prompted the AI tool to put everyone into one image, complete with them wearing stocking caps in front of the Rockefeller Christmas tree in New York City. 

“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. 

“That all goes toward getting much smarter about how we meet customers and make sure we’re meeting their needs,” Kempczinski told Fortune’s editor-at-large Geoff Colvin in 2023. “For example, when someone pulls up in the drive-thru, we could show them a menu board that’s bespoke to them. We become smarter in our ability to figure out what offer they may be getting.”

How other CEOs are using AI in their personal lives and at work

Kempczinski is hardly the only CEO using AI in their personal and work lives. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says one way he uses AI in his personal life is by having conversations with it about podcasts he’s interested in.

Nadella uploads podcast transcripts into Microsoft Copilot so he can chat with the voice assistant about an episode’s content in the car during his commute, according to a Bloomberg profile about the CEO published in May 2025. He also heavily relies on Copilot to sort through and make sense of the countless emails and messages he receives every day, he told Bloomberg. 

Unsurprisingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also been open about how he uses his own technology—although he told the ReThinking podcast by Adam Grant he uses it “in the boring ways” like summarizing emails and documents. 

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.

“Clearly, people have been able to take care of babies without ChatGPT for a long time,” Altman said in an OpenAI podcast interview published in June 2025. “I don’t know how I would have done that.”