Yum Brands, the owner of fast-food chains Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Habit Burger, on Tuesday announced a partnership with the technology company Nvidia to bring AI to the company’s restaurants around the globe.
The partnership brings together one of the industry’s biggest companies and the Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia, one of the technology industry’s hottest names thanks to its pioneering work on artificial intelligence. Nvidia was set to announce its latest AI chips at a developers’ conference on Tuesday.
It also comes just weeks after the Louisville, Kentucky-based Yum announced the formation of Byte by Yum, a consolidation of the company’s technology capabilities under a single platform.
Yum Brands and Nvidia are collaborating at the developer level to bring AI to three key areas at the restaurant company: voice AI in the drive-thru and at call centers; computer vision; and assessing restaurant and manager performance.
“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,” said Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer for Yum and president of Byte by Yum.
Though its stock is down so far this year, Nvidia’s work on AI computing has helped its shares surge more than 2,000% over the past five years. The company’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, is a former Denny’s dishwasher who has long boasted about the role the family-dining chain has played in his career. And apparently he helped prepare breakfast at a Denny’s mobile unit on Tuesday.
Yum has been among the restaurant industry’s leaders in recent years in adding technology to its locations, believing that its size—its brands have 61,000 locations worldwide—gives it an inherent advantage over most other restaurant companies.
Its partnership with Nvidia should take that even further. Yum has already been testing some of Nvidia’s AI technology in Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations in the U.S. That test has been successful enough that Yum is planning to expand it to 500 restaurants, including KFC and Habit locations, for the second quarter this year.
Yum has the ability to help Nvidia test and expand its retail and restaurant technology in a large number of locations around the world. Nvidia’s technology can quickly handle large volumes of data. The two companies hope the result enables AI to tackle more complex tasks inside the restaurants, helping them operate more efficiently.
For Yum, that will in theory help the franchisees that operate the vast majority of those 61,000 locations operate their restaurants more efficiently, “while delighting consumers and maximizing shareholder returns.”
Working with Yum Brands to integrate Nvidia’s AI software “breaks barriers to AI innovation in the restaurant industry, delivering realtime, context-aware intelligence, powered by a scalable inference platform,” Andrew Sun, global director of retail, CPG and QSR business development for Nvidia, said in a statement.
The partnership should also enable Yum to integrate more advanced AI models, such as large language models, into its operations, which should be able to pave the way for more innovative applications, such as personalized consumer interactions.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.