Yum! signs AI deal to bolster CX for restaurant brands

KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell owner Yum! Brands is accelerating the development of AI technologies for its restaurants around the globe, as part of plans to boost customer experience as well as operational performance.

The company, which claims to be the world’s largest restaurant business with over 61,000 locations, has signed up to be Nvidia’s first AI restaurant partner, to integrate AI into the restaurant and retail industry at an unprecedented scale.

Yum! and Nvidia are planning to transform the future of dining by unlocking scalable AI applications quickly, reliably and affordably.

The technology will power and scale Yum!’s existing proprietary Byte by Yum! platform. Through a direct collaboration at the developer level, Yum! was able to deploy Nvidia’s AI-powered voice AI agents within three months.

This partnership will harness easy-to-use Nvidia NIM microservices, part of Nvidia AI Enterprise and available on Amazon Web Services, to optimise and create efficiencies in restaurant operations, enhancing team member and customer experiences.

The AI solutions will be instrumental in a number of key areas across Yum! Brands, including voice automated order-taking AI agents that adapt to human speech patterns, understand complex menus and customer preferences, and enable a more natural, seamless ordering experience.

Meanwhile, deploying Nvidia-powered computer vision will aim to optimise drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labour management through real-time analytics and alerts.

And, finally, by using AI-driven analytics and agents to assess restaurant performance, personalised action plans will be developed for restaurant managers based on best practices from top-performing locations.

Yum! Brands has already begun piloting multiple AI solutions in select Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations in the US using Nvidia technology. Following a successful pilot, a broader rollout of this technology targeting 500 restaurants across Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC and Habit Burger is planned for the second quarter of this year.

The ultimate aim of Yum!’s digital and technology strategy is to better serve its franchisees, providing them with better, faster, cheaper and safer technology while benefitting consumers and maximising shareholder returns.

Looking ahead, Yum! is expanding AI to help team members manage complex tasks, including AI agents that plan, reason and act to assist across restaurants.

The intelligence built with the latest Nvidia software will be proprietary to Yum!, giving the company full ownership to customise and evolve its technology stack. This will enable Yum! to integrate more advanced AI models, such as large language models, into its operations, and pave the way for innovative applications, including sentiment analysis and personalized customer interactions.

Yum! Brands chief digital and technology officer Joe Park, who is also president of Byte by Yum!, said: “We have a bold vision to deliver leading-edge, AI-powered technology capabilities to our customers and team members globally

“This partnership will enable us to harness the rich consumer and operational data-sets on our Byte by Yum! integrated platform to build smarter AI engines that will create easier experiences for our customers and team members.”

Last week, KFC launched the latest instalment of its “Believe in Chicken” campaign (pictured) in the UK, featuring cult followers venturing into the woods to plunge into a lake of sacred gravy before making an offering to a giant golden egg. It has received a mixed reaction online>