Yum! Brands (YUM) — the parent company of popular fast-food chains Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC — may be cooking up something new in its locations as it hopes to implement AI and automation tools to further boost its sales. Despite missing first-quarter earnings estimates, Yum! Brands reported record digital sales mix surpassing 50% in the quarter.

Yum! Brands Chief Digital and Technology Officer Joe Park sits down with Josh Lipton to discuss how it is using artificial intelligence at the company's locations.

"We believe in the power of digital to build deeper relationships with our customers, end to end," Park elaborates. "When you think about one example with drive-thru, let's take an example of Taco Bell, customers really want to make sure that they have timely acknowledgment at the drive-thru. They want to make sure that they're understood when they're ordering and there's friendliness. So one technology we get really excited about is voice AI. We've piloted it in five stores at Taco Bell and we've seen the results. We know that team members enjoy the technology. It feels like they're getting another team member added to just handle the drive-thru. And we know that customers, when they're asked about it, they see parity when it comes to the friendliness, the timeliness, and being able to be understood by AI.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

Moving on A I could soon make fast food even faster young brands, putting automation tools to work at KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell locations across the country.

And it's making an impact in the company's most recent quarter.

Digital sales hit a record accounting for more than 50% of total sales for the first time in Yum's history with us.

Now to discuss all things.

Automation is Joe Paul.

He is young brand's chief, Digital and Technology Officer, Joe.

It is good to see you and you know, Joe, it's a perfect time to have you on the show because we've got A I on the brain.

Joe, of course, Apple, today you had Tim Cook.

He's talking about Apple's new A I strategy and vision and A I features how Joe, let's start there.

Kinda high level.

How are you integrating Joe A I across your businesses?

Walk us through it.

Yeah, first Josh, good afternoon.

Thanks for having me.

Excited to be on.

So at ya, we're ingraining technology into all parts of our business and we wanna make sure that we have easy experiences for our customers, our team members while driving profitable growth for Ym and our franchisees, you know, to your question, you know, for us, as we think about, um we're building and buying technologies that make things easy in terms of experiences, easy operations and easy insights.

And A I is the perfect technology to do that.

Um For us, one of our favorite examples of seeing A I at work is in our Pizza Hut business.

We have this platform called Dragon Tail.

It's a proprietary piece of technology that really helps our team members make pizza.

Uh You think about from the preparing stage to the baking stage to uh delivery to a customer.

And you know, trying to figure out how to make this job really easy for a team member so that customers get hot and fresh pizza all the time.

And so the there, Joe, you're talking about how you're kind of implementing it for, for maybe managers and employees.

Are you also experimenting with it when it comes to the the consumer?

Yeah, you know, for us, we believe in the power of digital to build a deeper relationships with their customers end to end.

And that customer journey is so important when you think about one example with driver, let's take the example of Taco Bell.

Customers really want to make sure that they have timely acknowledgment at the drive through.

They wanna make sure that they're understood when they're ordering and there's friendliness.

So one technology we get really excited about is voice A I, we've piloted it in five stores at Taco Bell and we've seen the results.

We know that team members enjoy the technology.

Uh It feels like they're getting another team member added to just handle the driver and we know that customers when they're asked about it, they see parity when it comes to the friendliness, the timeliness and being able to be understood by A I and sometimes Joe, you know, you, you find yourself kind of experimenting with new technology, you can get yourself and you know, you can feel some blowback.

I think about Wendy's and dynamic pricing.

I'm interested, Joe.

Joe, how you kind of manage that and maybe just get your thoughts on, on dynamic pricing in, in general, Joe uh uh across yam and our brands.

We don't do any dynamic pricing.

What we do do is have intelligent pricing where we do use technologies like A I to come up with the best prices we can offer uh to our customers.

Yam and our brands are known for the great value we bring in the delicious food.

And so when it comes to things like pricing, we're confident that as we partner with our franchisees, we can protect the unit economics while continuing to give them the value they uh they've come to expect them of.

And, and one question, Joe, you know, whenever we talk about integrating all this technology A I automation, you know, the, the natural question is what is gonna mean, Joe uh for the men and women working at, at these fast food chains.

What will it mean, Joe?

Is this technology gonna displace those folks?

So firstly at we're in the people, business team members are at the core of our success.

And for us, a big part of our responsibility is figuring out how to make sure that we can invest our time and energy and giving them easier experiences.

We talk about easy operations and making such our team members, our restaurant general managers can run their restaurants as simply as possible.

Um We think that this can help them with order accuracy, which doesn't take away jobs, it can help them with the speed of service.

It could certainly help with friendliness.

One of our favorite examples is with kiosks.

Uh take a look at our KFC business where back in 2022 a quarter of our restaurants had self-service kiosks.

Uh today, uh over 50% of our 20,000 KFC restaurants have self-service kiosks and why we love this.

It's win, win for our team members.

It frees them up from the front counter so they can focus on more things across the restaurants to give a better customer experience and for our customers, they can customize their hearts out on these self-service kiosks and get what they want and love Joe KFC Taco Bell.

I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

Thank you for joining the show.

Today.

Appreciate it, sir.

Thank you, Josh.