Joe Park, the chief digital and technology officer of one of the largest restaurant companies in the world, wants things to be easy.
“It’s never been harder to be in the restaurant industry,” said Park, who leads the tech strategy for Yum Brands Inc., parent to the Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger & Grill brands.
Speaking on the last day of the FSTEC conference in Dallas on Wednesday, Park made the case that technology should fundamentally make things easier—for team members, for franchisees, and, perhaps most importantly, for customers.
But for a company that includes four iconic restaurant chains with more than 60,000 restaurants collectively in 155 markets, bringing in the technology that guests, employees and franchisees will want—now and in the future—is incredibly complex.
Yum in recent years has made a series of tech acquisitions that the company believes will be core to the way the brands work. And in the last year, the company has made a series of big investments in technology, including deploying kiosks, automating back-of-house operations, rolling out a proprietary point-of-sales system and creating a global data hub.
But Yum is still in early innings.
“We’re at a point where 120 of our 155 markets have at least one of our technologies,” he said.
For Yum, the next wave will include the use of artificial intelligence, which Park said is already proving beneficial.
Taco Bell, for example, is using Voice AI in the drive thrus of several hundred units, where it has helped improve order accuracy, speed and even friendliness. Restaurants have started naming their chatbots things like “Becky with the Good Hair,” he said. “It feels like we just added a new team member to the restaurant.”
Human employees love it because it takes over tasks that, for humans, had become somewhat robotic.
“It’s about removing the robot from the human and letting team members be more human,” he said.
Park said Yum’s strategy is “AI first, but not AI everywhere.” But AI has the added benefit of becoming smarter and therefore quicker to roll out.
Yum has been centralizing data on a platform the company calls Yum Crave AI. It collects voice and video data across the world, and tracks order accuracy and things like the number of cars in the drive thru, for example.
At Pizza Huts using the (Yum acquired) kitchen management system Dragontail, for example, the data shows where 38% of pizza orders were paused from being baked because there were no delivery drivers available, preventing them from sitting and getting cold. The result: customer satisfaction scores went up.
In another market, transcripts of drive-thru interactions revealed that many guests were asking for potato wedges, though that menu item had been discontinued. In theory, that data could inform whether there’s demand to bring a menu item back. (In this case, they put up a sign saying potato wedges were no longer on the menu.)
That data can be translated across brands and markets to help restaurants operate better, he said.
And Park is predicting AI-fueled tech will have a “snowball effect.”
An AI-based inventory system that took a year to launch at KFC, will take only six months at Taco Bell, and likely three months at Pizza Hut, he said.
Fundamentally, however, Park doesn’t see Yum as a technology company.
“We’ll always be a people company,” he said.
But noting that he is, after all, a CTO, he added that, with technology, “I’m going to do whatever I can to enable that.”
UPDATE: This story has been updated to correct the reference to Taco Bell's use of Voice AI.
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