Former Chief Digital & Technology Officer and President of Byte by Yum, Yum Brands
Search every verified Joe Park interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Joe Park, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Yum! Brands, discussed the company's use of artificial intelligence in an interview published on April 26, 2025. He stated that Yum! Brands views technology as playing a role in nearly every part of a customer's journey, aiming to create frictionless ordering, easier operations for team members, and more profitable businesses for franchisees. Park noted that the company's digital sales mix grew from 19% pre-COVID to over 50% currently, and he described the company as "probably more like an e-commerce company than a traditional brick and mortar." He outlined a technology philosophy of starting with a business problem first, then partnering with operations and marketing teams to address metrics such as order accuracy, customer satisfaction, and speed of service. Park highlighted the company's partnership with Nvidia to accelerate its AI ambitions, and noted that all 7,000 Taco Bell locations already have two edge computers in each store, allowing AI to run within the restaurant rather than in the cloud. He said that voice AI in Taco Bell drive-thrus has been received positively by team members, who report it helps them multitask. Park stated that Yum! Brands builds technology that is core to restaurant operations, such as kitchen management, but partners with leading companies for bleeding-edge innovations like large language models. He also said the company is not pursuing dynamic pricing, believing that area still requires human knowhow due to promotions and customer demographics.
“We went from 19% digital sales mix pre-COVID to over 50% digital sales today and so in that way we're probably more like an e-commerce company than a traditional brick and mortar.”
“If it's core to our restaurants operations we really want to own it we'll build it and it's kept within team. If it's innovation bleeding edge technology that we're chasing after we're going to partner. We're not in the business of trying to create our own LLMs we're going to absolutely partner with the leading compani...”
“AI does that faster than a human can; it helps remove the thinking, it reduces the mistakes and kitchen management is so core to running a restaurant that that's something we absolutely should own.”
“Our technology philosophy or strategy is that we always start with the business problem first. It often comes down to partnering with our operations teams and marketing teams to land in examples like order accuracy, customer satisfaction, and speed of service.”
“When we've put voice AI into the drive-thru for our Taco Bell, our team members are often the first ones to say this technology is helping me do other things inside the restaurant and multitask better than I have before. In fact, it's making this job easier.”
“There's always a first aversion saying 'Oh this is AI they can't do what I do, I have decades of experience.' Most often they're right, they're probably outpacing AI, but they admit we can't scale humans. So how do we get the knowhow into our AI products to improve operations throughout the whole system?”
“We're not in the business of looking at dynamic pricing. We have talented marketing teams that work closely with franchises leveraging data, but all this information is usually tuned to each market. We believe it's an area that still requires human knowhow because of promotions and customer demographics.”
“If you go to any of our 7,000 Taco Bells today, we have two edge computes in every single one of the stores already. Edge computing is providing all that computing horsepower inside a restaurant so we can run AI within the store and maybe not in the cloud. It future-proofs us as we put more AI capabilities into a resta...”
Joe Park, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Yum! Brands, shares how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the fast food ...
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