Dive Brief:
- Yum Brands and Nvidia are working together to speed up Yum’s development of artificial intelligence, the companies announced Tuesday. Nvidia’s technology will support Yum’s proprietary tech system, Byte. Yum is the tech firm’s first restaurant partner.
- Yum piloted several AI tools at some Pizza Hut and Taco Bell locations earlier this year, and plans a broader rollout at about 500 restaurants across these brands, KFC and Habit Burger during the second quarter.
- Yum’s strategy in recent years has hinged on building up its proprietary tech systems through acquisitions and in-house development, with the aim of keeping ahead of its major QSR competitors.
Dive Insight:
Yum said the technologies developed in partnership with Nvidia will focus on three areas: drive-thru and call-center voice AI, computer vision to analyze operations and AI analytics at the restaurant level. The partnership includes Nvidia’s software and may eventually yield “AI agents that plan, reason and act to assist across restaurants,” according to the press release.
The voice ordering tech, which uses Nvidia Riva and Nvidia NIM microservices, can handle complex menus and speech patterns, according to the press release.
The computer vision tech includes a component of real-time labor surveillance meant to “optimize drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management through real-time analytics and alerts,” the press release said.
Yum did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the ethical issues raised by algorithmic and AI surveillance of workers.
The restaurant-level analytics, which Yum refers to as Accelerated Restaurant Intelligence, will be used to create action plans for restaurant managers at struggling locations, using best practices from stronger-performing units.
By working with Nvidia, Yum aims to reduce the cost and increase the speed and quality of the tech tools available to franchisees. The technology also benefits from the scale of Yum’s 61,000 stores and the vast amounts of information generated by its transactions, according to the press release.
Joe Park, Yum’s chief digital and technology officer, said the program would “enable us to harness the rich consumer and operational data sets on our Byte by Yum! integrated platform.”
Tools built through the program will be proprietary to Yum, the press release said. Ultimately, Yum wants to integrate “technology into every touch point, across every restaurant, around the world.”
Last year, Yum announced it would deploy voice-AI at hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus. The chain also expanded the number of restaurants using its restaurant coaching mobile app to 20,000 Pizza Hut and KFC locations in more than 120 countries, according to Yum’s most recent earnings call.
The company’s kitchen and delivery system, called Dragontail before it was folded into Byte, is live in 8,000 stores. Yum plans to expand it across its U.S. systems for Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC in 2025. Likewise, the restaurant company expects to deploy back-of-house management tech across its Taco Bell U.S. store system this year, according to the earnings call.
