Taco Bell Parent Accelerates AI Innovation With Nvidia

Quick-service restaurant (QSR) giant Yum! Brands has partnered with Nvidia to develop and scale artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for its restaurants.

These technologies will be deployed at the QSR company’s KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Habit Burger & Grill restaurants, the companies said in a Tuesday (March 18) press release.

The partnership will help scale Yum! Brands’ existing proprietary AI-driven restaurant technology platform Byte by Yum!, according to the release.

“This partnership will enable us to harness the rich consumer and operational datasets on our Byte by Yum! integrated platform to build smarter AI engines that will create easier experiences for our customers and team members,” Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer at Yum! Brands and president of Byte by Yum!, said in the release.

The AI solutions will include voice-automated order-taking AI agents for drive-thru and call center operations, computer vision for optimizing drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management, and AI-driven analytics and agents for assessing restaurant performance and generating personalized action plans for restaurant managers, according to the release.

Yum! Brands has already piloted several AI solutions in select Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations and, after the success of the pilot, plans to roll out the technology to 500 Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC and Habit Burger restaurants during the second quarter, the release said.

Looking ahead, the company plans to continue expanding its use of AI and integrate more advanced AI models, developing solutions that will be built with the latest Nvidia software and be proprietary to Yum!, per the release.

Andrew Sun, global director of retail, CPG and QSR business development at Nvidia, said in the release that working with the Yum! Brands team and platform to integrate Nvidia AI software “breaks barriers to AI innovation in the restaurant industry — delivering real-time, context-aware intelligence, powered by a scalable inference platform.”

Yum! Brands said in February that the Byte by Yum! AI-driven platform was already in use at 25,000 international locations and will be rolled out throughout its global locations.

In November, the company said that it had processed over 2 million successful orders with the drive-thru voice AI system it had in place in over 300 Taco Bell stores in the U.S. and that many franchisees were eager to test this innovation at their own locations.

Yum! Brands also said in November that early, limited pilots of AI-powered marketing campaigns had delivered double-digit increases in customer engagement compared to traditional digital marketing campaigns.