Yum Brands partners with Nvidia to accelerate AI technologies across its global system
The partnership will initially focus on three key areas — voice AI ordering at the drive-thru and in call centers, computer vision, and restaurant intelligence.
19 March 2025
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Some Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants have already begun piloting Nvidia’s AI technology| Photo Credit: Yum Brands
Artificial intelligence was a major theme throughout Taco Bell’s recent Live Más Live and Consumer Day event in New York City. During his presentation, Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer of parent company Yum Brands, said, “Our belief is that every aspect of a restaurant can be touched by AI.”
Taco Bell, he added, has invested more than $1 billion in these “leading-edge capabilities.”
“It’s the best investment we could have made. We went from 19% in digital sales to over 50%,” he said.
Don’t expect Yum to rest on its laurels anytime soon. The company — which also includes KFC, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger & Grill — today announced a partnership with Nvidia to accelerate the development of AI technologies across its 61,000-plus restaurants worldwide. California-based chip manufacturer Nvidia recently claimed the top spot as the world’s largest company, surpassing tech giant Apple amid a global AI boom. Since 2022, the company’s market value has grown by 850%, driven by demand for AI technologies. Yum Brands is the 32-year-old tech company’s first restaurant partner.
The restaurant giant will leverage Nvidia’s applications to scale its existing Byte by Yum platform, which was formally launched in February. Through a direct collaboration at the developer level, Yum was able to deploy Nvidia voice AI agents within three months, the company said.
“At Yum, we have a bold vision to deliver leading-edge, AI-powered technology capabilities to our customers and team members globally,” Park, who is also the president of the new Byte by Yum division, said in a statement. “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.”
The partnership will leverage Nvidia NIM microservices, part of Nvidia AI Enterprise and available on Amazon Web Services, to initially optimize three key areas for Yum:
Voice AI ordering: Drive-thrus and call centers will use conversational AI, powered by Nvidia Riva and Nvidia NIM microservices, that adapts to human speech patterns, understands complex menus and customer preferences, and enables a more seamless ordering experience, according to the company.
Nvidia-powered computer vision to enhance operations, optimizing drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management through real-time analytics and alerts.
Accelerated restaurant intelligence using AI-generated analytics and agents to help restaurant managers improve performance with personalized, actionable recommendations based on best practices from top-performing locations.
Pilots of these technologies are already underway in select Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations in the United States, with a broader rollout targeting 500 restaurants across all Yum Brands restaurants planned during the second quarter.
In a release, Yum said the goal is to provide its franchisees with “better, faster, cheaper, and safer technology, while delighting consumers, and maximizing shareholder returns.” Notably, the intelligence built with the latest Nvidia software will be proprietary to Yum and will be integrated into Byte, giving the company full ownership to customize and evolve its tech stack as more advanced AI models — such as large language models — come into play.
“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,” Nvidia’s global director of retail, CPG, and QSR business development Andrew Sun said in a statement. “Working with Yum Brands’ best-in-class digital and 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.”
Terms of the strategic partnership are subject to mutually agreeable definitive agreements.
Source: Nation’s Restaurant News
