AI on the Menu: Yum! Brands and NVIDIA Partner to Accelerate Restaurant Industry Innovation

The quick-service restaurant industry is a marvel of modern logistics, where speed, teamwork and kitchen operations are key ingredients for every order. Yum! Brands is now introducing AI-powered agents at select Pizza Hut and Taco Bell locations to assist and enhance the team member experience.

Today at the NVIDIA GTC conference, Yum! Brands announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA with a goal of deploying multiple AI solutions using NVIDIA technology in 500 restaurants this year.

World’s Largest Restaurant Company Advances AI Adoption

Spanning more than 61,000 locations, Yum! operates more restaurants than any other company in the world. Globally, customers are drawn to the food, value, service and digital convenience from iconic brands like KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Habit Burger & Grill.

Yum!’s industry-leading digital technology team continues to pioneer the company’s AI-accelerated strategy with the recent announcement of Byte by Yum!, Yum!’s proprietary and digital AI-driven restaurant technology platform.

Generative AI-powered customer-facing experiences like automated ordering can help speed operations — but they’re often difficult to scale because of complexity and costs.

To manage that complexity, developers at Byte by Yum! harnessed NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA Riva to build new AI-accelerated voice ordering agents in under four months. The voice AI is deployed on Amazon EC2 P4d instances accelerated by NVIDIA A100 GPUs, which enables the agents to understand natural speech, process complex menu orders and suggest add-ons — increasing accuracy and customer satisfaction and helping reduce bottlenecks in high-volume locations.

The new collaboration with NVIDIA will help Yum! advance its ongoing efforts to have its engineering and data science teams in control of their own intelligence — and deliver scalable inference costs, making large-scale deployments possible.

“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 and technology officer of Yum! Brands, Inc. and president of 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 datasets on our Byte by Yum! integrated platform to build smarter AI engines that will create easier experiences for our customers and team members.”

Rollout of AI Solutions Underway

Yum!’s voice AI agents are already being deployed across its brands, including in call centers to handle phone orders when demand surges during events like game days. An expanded rollout of AI solutions at up to 500 restaurants is expected this year.

Computer Vision and Restaurant Intelligence

Beyond AI-accelerated ordering, Yum! is also testing NVIDIA computer vision software to analyze drive-thru traffic and explore new use cases for AI to perceive, alert and adjust staffing, with the goal of optimizing service speed.

Another initiative focuses on NVIDIA AI-accelerated restaurant operational intelligence. Using NIM microservices, Yum! can deploy applications analyzing performance metrics across thousands of locations to generate customized recommendations for managers, identifying what top-performing stores do differently and applying those insights system-wide.

With the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform — available on AWS Marketplace — Byte by Yum! is streamlining AI development and deployment through scalable NVIDIA infrastructure in the cloud.

The bottom line: AI is making restaurant operations and dining experiences easier, faster and more personal for the world’s largest restaurant company.