Former Chief Digital & Technology Officer and President of Byte by Yum, Yum! Brands
Yum! Brands CTO on AI's Role in Fast Food & Partnership with Nvidia
Joe Park, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Yum! Brands, shares how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the fast food ...
About Joe Park
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.
Transcript (30 segments)
N
Nora0:03
All right, Joe, great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.
J
Joe Park0:07
Thanks for having me, Nora.
N
Nora0:09
So Yum Brands is a brand that we've mostly all experienced in some way or another, owning iconic brands like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC. So going big picture first, how is technology, specifically AI, really helping to drive the fast food industry forward right now?
J
Joe Park0:26
Yeah, you know, when we think about technology at Yum Brands, whether it's KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, or The Habit Burger & Grill, we do believe that technology can actually play a part in almost every part of a customer's journey when they're interacting with one of our brands. Not only the customers, but also team members. For us, we think that technology helps with easier experiences where it makes things frictionless for customers to be able to order and access their favorite food. We think that for easy operations, our team members already have a tough job; technology can make it even easier. And finally, for our franchisees, data, AI, and insights help us provide them with a more profitable, growing business.
N
Nora1:07
Let's get a little bit more tangible. From the consumer perspective, how might your everyday consumer come across AI technology in your restaurants, whether they know it or not?
J
Joe Park1:18
Yeah, you know, one of our philosophies is to make sure that we take advantage of AI and be AI-first, make it ubiquitous but not obtrusive. So one of the pilots we're running with AI that a customer might experience is if you go to one of our 500 Taco Bells piloting voice AI. You pull into the drive-thru and you're able to interact with AI that's able to take your order, coordinate with the team member who's working at the drive-thru, and be able to process all that in such a way that a customer is greeted with a consistent voice. Maybe there's a suggestion to buy something that customer might really like. Eventually, personalize it so if there's a history of things that they've bought that we know consistently, it should be asked to delight our customers. Those are all ways in which today customers can experience AI.
N
Nora2:09
And in those situations, is the customer aware that it's AI, or is the idea for it to feel like it's another human they're talking to?
J
Joe Park2:15
You know, as it stands today, I think we're still learning, like the rest of the industry. So customers are absolutely aware it is AI. What we've observed in our pilots is that as the technology continues to get better, what we enjoy is that you can also start seeing the improvements in the voice. The voice starts to sound a little more natural. Customers start questioning, 'Oh, is that really AI or is that a human?' And you know, eventually I think it'll be very easy to confuse or mistake the chicken.
N
Nora2:41
Interesting. So you're trying to make this technology more accessible across your restaurants. I understand Yum launched Byte by Yum recently. I know you're leading it as president. So break down what this new system is and what makes it different and useful for your restaurants.
J
Joe Park2:56
Yeah, you know, the problem we were really solving for is when you look at the history of QSR, really since digital sales have exploded. So at Yum, 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. So what happens when that shifts? Well, technology becomes more important. And we started realizing that many restaurants started having many bits of technology. Byte really meant to solve that. Byte meant to unify all these disparate technologies that are today supported by vendors and bring them all under a unified platform powered by AI and making it easier to run our restaurants so we can serve better food to our customers.
N
Nora3:41
Got it. And you've also partnered with Nvidia to power key AI initiatives as well. You have drive-thru voice agents, you've alluded to some of these, kitchen vision systems, restaurant analytics. What are some of the most exciting use cases specifically that you're working on right now that you can highlight?
J
Joe Park3:56
Yeah, you know, this is an industry first for us where we want to have the world's largest restaurant company, Yum Brands, with its 61,000 restaurants and growing, with the leading company in AI, Nvidia. And we just thought, wow, if we could combine these two together, we can accelerate some of the results that we'd already seen with AI. We talked about voice AI where when we piloted in a call center to be able to take on some of the phone calls that customers might be making into a Pizza Hut, we were able to bring a pilot to life in about three months partnering with Nvidia, which otherwise could have taken over a year or two to get to the same stage. And so it's through that partnership. When we look ahead, we get really excited about things like voice AI, computer vision that you mentioned, but also being able to take all this rich data, whether it's on the internet, whether it's in instruction manuals, whether it's just knowledge that's really stored within our restaurant general managers' heads, pull that all together, get really good insights, and have humans in our restaurants talk to AI to help them do their jobs better and make it easier.
N
Nora5:00
On that to that end, how do you think about building AI capabilities internally versus some of these partnerships where you can leverage existing data, leverage existing models? Do you have a philosophy around, I guess, build versus buy or build versus partner?
J
Joe Park5:16
Yeah, I mean, something we talk about a lot and we have a strategy that we follow, which is: if it's core to our restaurant operations, we really want to own it, we'll build it and it's kept within the 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 companies there, and hence the partnership with Nvidia. And then finally, where we need speed in any of our 155-plus markets that serve Yum's foods, local vendors working with partners to be able to have a third party come in and help, that's certainly part of our strategy too.
N
Nora5:54
When you talk about technology that is core to your operations and that's the type of AI tech that you want to own, what do you mean exactly by that? What is core to operations?
J
Joe Park6:03
Yeah, a good example is several years ago we bought a company called Dragontail, which is now pulled into our Byte suite, and what it does is kitchen management systems. So if you think about this core capability, imagine calling into a Pizza Hut on a Friday. Let's say that you're the general manager of the store and there are dozens of orders being called in at the same time. If you think about the manual effort today to figure out okay, who should receive pizza, when is it first in first out, last in first out, where do you live, and just trying to pull all the information together, it's like you're working air traffic control. 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.
N
Nora6:53
What are some of the key metrics when you're testing out these new technologies or new customer experiences that are core to success for you? Is it really the ultimate customer experience? Is it time management efficiency? Just zoom out a little bit for us. How do you know it's working?
J
Joe Park7:09
Yeah, so our technology philosophy or strategy is that we always start with the business problem first. What opportunity do we want to address? And so it often comes down to partnering with our operations teams and our marketing teams, and they'll land in examples like order accuracy to make sure that that metric is as high as can be. We know that in terms of customer satisfaction, that will matter in the form of surveys that they fill out to see if their food is hot, fresh, and tasty. Those are pretty easy to measure. And finally, speed of service. When you're at the drive-thru or you're getting delivery, making sure that you receive the food when you want it, not always the fastest, but when you're home and you're ready and you want that food. So those are examples of when we start with them first, then you can back into what technologies could possibly help prove them.
N
Nora7:55
Yeah, that's a good point. You don't necessarily want it to come super quickly in case you're not going to be home and you're just timing it for when you arrive from somewhere else. So you know, one of the biggest concerns that gets brought up a lot when you talk about AI is jobs for human jobs. Do you see AI replacing roles in kitchens and at your restaurants, or being supplementary and enhancing existing jobs? What is your outlook on how it is going to impact physical jobs?
J
Joe Park8:24
Yeah, you know, for us, we're in the people business, is what we always say. We're always putting people at the center of our business. And even when you think about voice AI, our primary purpose going into it wasn't necessarily to think towards that dystopian, removing job scenario. In fact, you know, when we've put voice AI into the drive-thru for our Taco Bell, our team members are often the first ones to say, 'Hey, 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.' And I think when you think about that and being able to apply that to other parts of their jobs, it really helps them focus more on serving the customers who come to the drive-thru or at the counter and think of additional services that they could provide, but also helps them focus on other ways to better run the restaurant because it's already a place that's so data-rich that having the extra time can really help them focus on ways to improve operations.
N
Nora9:19
For any other leaders out there who are trying to implement AI within their teams, whether it's in the restaurant business or not, what is your advice on how to educate employees and keep them informed and keep them excited about new technology without folks being worried about this concern that we just talked about, their jobs being replaced?
J
Joe Park9:41
Yeah, you know, it's a question I get a lot when I talk to my peers or travel out there. And this concept of having a digital and AI mindset is so important. It's not about the technology; it's really about classic change management. Making sure that when people are greeted with change in general, we don't like that. Humans just don't like change in general. And so often times we found that when you educate, step one, in what the technology actually is and isn't. You know, we're not at a point of general AI where these things become, you know, a living... yeah, that's right, it's still dumb AI as we say, where it's just trained on a lot of data. And so you have to remove that fear barrier with education. Then second is to get their hands on it, test it out, see, you know, try to break it, and you'll get a sense of appreciation for it. And then finally, once you get through the education and the training, what we've often found to be helpful is when they have to start being able to use it and see what the actual benefits are and see how it impacts their jobs. You know, living and breathing it. Those three tend to help us shrink the change curve.
N
Nora10:46
What would you say has been the general reception amongst employees you've talked to? Are they excited? Are they happy that Yum Brands is on the forefront of AI tech? Just give us a sense of what the feeling is internally.
J
Joe Park10:56
Yeah, so you know, as I've done many store visits throughout Pizza Huts, KFCs, Taco Bells, and Habits, number one thing I always see is there's always a first aversion, natural aversion, saying, 'Oh, this is AI, they can't do what I do. You know, I have got decades of experience doing this.' And most often times they're right; they're probably outpacing AI. What they will also admit is that we can't scale humans. So no matter how great our restaurant general manager is, they will admit there's only one of them, and there are tens of thousands of restaurants across Yum. And so how do we get the DNA, how do we get the know-how into our AI products so that kitchen management system, such that inventory, such that pricing, such that all these things that we depend on humans today can be improved with AI? And so team members' reaction today is, 'I could probably do it better,' but as they start seeing the data and seeing how we can scale it, they actually think, 'Hey, this could actually help us improve operations throughout the whole system.'
N
Nora11:56
You mentioned pricing. A hot topic in the world of food and restaurants has been dynamic pricing. Wendy's had floated it, adjusting prices depending on demand and time of day, etc. They got quite a bit of heat even for floating the idea. Is that something you're exploring, the idea of dynamic pricing?
J
Joe Park12:16
Now, we're not in the business of looking at dynamic pricing. You know, for us, I think we've got talented marketing teams that work closely with franchisees who leverage data, but you know, all this information that we collect is usually being tuned to each of the markets that we have. We do believe it's an area that still requires human know-how because of the promotions we have, because of the LTOs we have, and just really being attuned to what the customers want within their demographic. No dynamic pricing coming from you guys.
N
Nora12:42
Probably comforting for most customers. So lastly, I just want to get back into the technology itself and maybe the more cutting-edge tech that you're implementing. I know McDonald's is reportedly using edge computing to train its AI. Just give us a little bit of a sense if that's the sort of thing that Yum Brands is also tackling. What is edge computing first and foremost, and what are the technologies that are on the cutting edge that you're super excited about?
J
Joe Park13:10
Yeah, look, I think through our partnership with Nvidia, we're accelerating so much of our AI ambition. And I can't speak to competitors, but across Yum Brands, edge compute is one thing that we've been investing in for a while. 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. It's been a journey we've been on. And to answer the question, with edge compute, it's really providing all that computing horsepower inside of a restaurant such that we could run AI within the store and maybe not in the cloud. And so we think it's future-proofing us as we put more and more AI capabilities into a restaurant. Edge compute is enabling us to do it. In addition to that, I think the partnership with Nvidia with computer vision, being able to access some of the existing infrastructure we have in the restaurants, will help us make it even easier for team members to do things like order accuracy and speed of service.
N
Nora14:04
Awesome. We'll leave things there, Joe. Appreciate the time. Joe Park is the Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Yum Brands. Thanks again.
J
Joe Park14:11
Terrific. Thank you.