Yum! Brands teams up with Nvidia to develop AI solutions — including voice ordering
A quick-service restaurant giant is teaming up with a top provider of artificial intelligence technology to streamline operations such as drive-thru.
Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is partnering with Nvidia to accelerate the development of innovative AI technologies to manage a variety of tasks at its restaurants around the globe. Under the agreement, which makes Yum Nvidia’s first AI restaurant partner, the companies plan to develop technology which will support and scale Yum’s existing proprietary cloud-based Byte By Yum! platform.
[READ MORE: Yum! Brands continues to enhance customers’ digital experiences]
Yum has already begun piloting multiple AI solutions in select Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations in the U.S. using Nvidia technology. Following a successful pilot, a broader rollout of this technology targeting 500 restaurants across Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC and Habit Burger is planned for the second quarter of 2025.
The AI solutions will focus on enhancing operational performance in three key areas across Yum! Brands:
- Voice automated order-taking AI agents: Solutions based on Nvidia Riva speech and translation microservices and NIM API microservices will equip drive-thru and call center operations with conversational AI that adapts to human speech patterns, understands complex menus and customer preferences and enables a more natural, seamless ordering experience.
- Computer vision-enhanced operations: Yum! Brands will deploy Nvidia-based computer vision technology to optimize drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management through real-time analytics and alerts.
- Accelerated restaurant intelligence: The company will utilize AI-driven analytics and agents to assess restaurant performance and generate personalized action plans for restaurant managers based on best practices from top-performing locations.
"At Yum, we have a bold vision to deliver leading-edge, AI-powered technology capabilities to our customers and team members globally," said Joe Park, chief digital & technology officer, Yum! Brands, and president, Byte by Yum!. "We are thrilled to partner with a pioneering company like Nvidia to help us accelerate this ambition. 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."
Looking ahead, Yum intends to expand AI to help associates manage complex tasks, including AI agents that plan, reason and act to assist across restaurants. The intelligence built with Nvidia software will be proprietary to Yum!, giving the company full ownership to customize and evolve its technology stack.
Yum plans to integrate more advanced AI models, such as large language models, into its operations and pave the way for other innovative applications, including sentiment analysis and personalized customer interactions.
"Nvidia's software makes it affordable for even the largest restaurant company to improve operations and customer experiences, proving AI can pay off at every location," said Andrew Sun, global director of retail, CPG and QSR business development, Nvidia. "Working with Yum! Brands’ best-in-class digital & technology team and proprietary Byte by Yum! 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."
Major quick-service rivals of Yum are also collaborating with AI companies. McDonald’s recently entered a multi-year extension of its strategic partnership with Cognizant to enhance staff enablement, customer experience and operational efficiency.
Meanwhile, Wendy’s has been gradually expanding a pilot of its "Wendy’s FreshAI" platform based on Google Cloud's generative AI and large language models technology.
The terms of the strategic partnership between Yum! Brands and Nvidia are subject to mutually agreeable definitive agreements.
Yum! Brands, Inc., based in Louisville, Ky., and its subsidiaries franchise or operate a system of over 61,000 restaurants in more than 155 countries and territories under the banners KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger & Grill.
