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What just happened? AI is everywhere these days, including at many fast-food outlets where the technology is used to take drive-thru orders. Now, thanks to a partnership between Nvidia and Yum! Brands, owner of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, AI adoption at these restaurants is being accelerated – and it won’t just be at the drive-thru.
Announced during the Nvidia GTC conference, Yum! Brands says its strategic partnership with Nvidia has the goal of deploying multiple AI solutions using the company’s hardware in 500 restaurants, including Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and Habit Burger and Grill, starting in the second quarter of 2025. Yum has already been piloting Nvidia tech in some Pizza Hut and Taco Bell locations.
Fast food chains have been testing AI to take drive-thru orders for a while now. Wendy’s was one of the first to announce a trial of such a chatbot, made possible through a partnership with Google, at one of its restaurants in its home state of Ohio in 2023.
Yum’s partnership with Nvidia – the tech giant’s first with a restaurant company – will see Team Green’s technology harnessed by Byte by Yum!, Yum’s proprietary and digital AI-driven restaurant technology platform. The company aims to build new, more advanced AI voice ordering agents in under four months.
Beyond taking orders, Yum will also be using AI in other areas. One example is using computer vision software to analyze drive-thru traffic so the AI can optimize speed by alerting and adjusting staffing. Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer at Yum! Brands, told Business Insider that when things get busy at the drive-thru, the AI might suggest selling some quicker-turnover items instead of large, complex items that might take longer.
Yum writes that its AI agents are also being deployed in call centers to handle phone orders when demand surges during events such as game days.
Nvidia’s AI hardware will also be used to analyze performance metrics across thousands of restaurant locations to generate customized recommendations for managers, identifying what top-performing stores do differently.
Not all restaurant companies’ partnerships with tech firms have been successful. In June 2024, McDonald’s announced it was ending its two-year automated order taking (AOT) drive-thru experiment and partnership with IBM. It had implemented the system in around 100 locations, but there were plenty of customer videos showing it getting orders wrong. McDonald’s did say, however, it was confident that voice AI would be part of the restaurant chain’s future.
Yum’s announcement, unsurprisingly, did not mention any potential impact the partnership and additional AI agents might have on human jobs, other than stating it would “assist and enhance the team member experience.”
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