Taco Bell, Pizza Hut lean in on AI | LinkedIn (2024)

As Yum! Brands explores how digital & technology can enhance our restaurant operations and, in turn, help us better serve our customers – I’m grateful for world-class leaders like Joe Park who are dedicated to unlocking more innovative solutions that will drive growth. Thank you, Joe, for telling our story and highlighting all the exciting work we’re doing to remain relevant, easy and distinctive. #GoodGrowth https://lnkd.in/emFtWUYu

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Yum! Brands leading the charge into an "AI-first" era for fast food, with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut jumpstarting it. Here's what I think the workforce and businesses need to know:Data-driven Operations: Yum consolidates customer data across brands, leveraging it as the "secret sauce" for AI-driven decision-making.Investment in Technology: With digital sales doubling since 2019, Yum intensifies its tech investments, including AI and automation.Franchise Empowerment: SuperApp, with generative AI capabilities, empowers franchisees, streamlining operations and enhancing training.Future of Fast Food: AI-powered drive-throughs, image recognition, and digital kitchen management are reshaping the customer experience.💡Where I see this working great for the future workforce: Gamers and digital natives raised on screens will love this tech-infused approach to fast food. Let's inspire the next generation of AI enthusiasts! #AI #FastFoodTech

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Today marks a significant increase in the minimum wage for fast food workers in California, jumping from $16 to $20 per hour. This move is poised to impact the commercial real estate sector, particularly for restaurants and franchises operating on narrow profit margins. As highlighted in recent articles, businesses may face tough decisions to maintain profitability, potentially leading to price hikes for consumers and adjustments in staffing. Could this accelerate the adoption of AI and automated technologies in the fast food industry? Let's stay tuned to see how this unfolds over the next 12 to 24 months.

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Before. Yum! Brands’s e-commerce vendor couldn’t handle more than 700 Taco Bell orders a minute. Joe Park said the alternative Yum built can handle more than 4,600 orders a minute. (WOW!)Former #Walmart VP of associate #digitalexperience and #enterprisearchitecture, Joe Park worked to consolidate #data between Yum’s four brands. Now, sales and inventory data between KFC and Taco Bell is merged to improve #ML models telling restaurants what to order. “A lot of our attention is going into getting the data right and being able to work cross brands to see where we have commonality.”It's ALL ABOUT DATA = Better data allows Yum to create customer profiles and serve personalized offers, with the ultimate goal to increase visits and ticket sizes, upsell and bring in new customers. Data shared across brands, Park said, is the company’s “secret sauce.”“Every time we grow that digital sales number, it comes with accompanying #customerdata.”The Restaurant Technology Network has released #datastandards to help #restaurants ensure data can be shared consistently and seamlessly among systems. Check them out here - the more we have data consistency, the more you can utilize it to increase revenues and enhance customer experiences, cultivate #loyalty, like Yum is doing. Check them out here: https://lnkd.in/gGUDm86F Vadim Parizher, VP of Technology at Taco Bell sits on RTN's Board of Governors. He's a big advocate of #datastandards. Congratulations to Taco Bell and Yum! for being an #AI first QSR brand, leading the way and innovating quite spectacularly (just look at #TacoBellDEFY). Great stuff.

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With labor costs increasing and food costs increasing, fast food can now cost upwards of $10 a meal.Only a few years ago, fast food was seen as not only a quicker, but the cheaper(est) option for consumers. Now that’s not necessarily the case.Fast food’s target demographic is the middle class, not the poor, and that’s evident by price hikes that have been passed onto the consumer. Just look at this TIME article from 2011: https://lnkd.in/ehFhbBa2The “poor class” is getting squeezed out of even the cheapest restaurant food options and it makes more sense financially to cook at home.Fast food franchisees still have to make money on low margins and one of the easiest ways to cut back on costs is by cutting labor.“Now, pressured by higher labor costs—including California’s new minimum wage law—and inflation-weary customers, more fast-food operators are banking on AI to drive sales and help lower costs.”Over the next few years there will be a dramatic shift in restaurants embracing AI, which could be expensive to adopt at first, in order to cut labor costs. The hope is that in the long run the technology costs will gradually decline and level out to being much less than the replacement costs for workers.So what will happen to the lower working class that currently works at fast food restaurants which have also become unaffordable for many Americans? That’s the big question that I’m not sure anyone is prepared for or has an answer to.AI will change many things - a lot for the better - but I don’t think everyone is prepared for the economic impact.#Franchsing

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I enjoyed sitting down with The Wall Street Journal for an interview to share Yum! Brands' digital and technology strategy and progress.We discussed how Yum! Brands is ingraining digital and technology into all aspects of our business with exciting new capabilities that make things easy for customers and restaurant team members, while driving profitable growth for Yum! and our franchisees.Our brands have made massive strides in scaling our digital and AI-driven ecosystem in partnership with our franchisees, and I couldn't be prouder of our team's accomplishments. We are leveraging Yum's unique scale of having 4 brands with 58,000+ restaurants in 155+ countries to drive easy experiences, easy operations, and easy insights.This conversation was a fantastic opportunity to highlight the amazing talent we have across our brands at KFC Pizza Hut Taco Bell and The Habit Burger Grill, and what we're working on together next. Let me know what you think of the discussion here:#innovation #technology #digital #AI

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Yum brands has a vision for AI first. I really enjoyed reading this article… indeed there can be so many AI first journeys in this franchise based model that can take on so many challenges. My favorite bit of info in this article? An app called SuperApp where people can ask questions like “what should the oven temperature be?” Rather than comb through reals of info in manuals. Easy access to information buried in reams of text using natural language. Indeed the most relevant use case for GenAI today no matter what the industry! #AI #innovation https://lnkd.in/ebuTeY_J

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