Yum! Brands teams up with Nvidia to develop AI solutions — including voice ordering

Yum! Brands is partnering with Nvidia.

A quick-service restaurant giant is teaming up with a top provider of artificial intelligence technology to streamline operations such as drive-thru.

Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is partnering with Nvidia to accelerate the development of innovative AI technologies to manage a variety of tasks at its restaurants around the globe. Under the agreement, which makes the Yum  Nvidia’s first AI restaurant partner, the companies plan to develop technology which will support and scale Yum’s existing proprietary cloud-based Byte By Yum! platform.

[READ MORE: Yum! Brands continues to enhance customers’ digital experiences]

Yum! has already begun piloting multiple AI solutions in select Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations in the U.S. using Nvidia technology. Following a successful pilot, a broader rollout of this technology targeting 500 restaurants across Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC and Habit Burger is planned for the second quarter of 2025. 

The AI solutions will focus on enhancing operational performance in three key areas across Yum! Brands:

• Voice automated order-taking AI agents: Solutions based on Nvidia Riva speech and translation microservices and NIM API microservices will equip drive-thru and call center operations with conversational AI that adapts to human speech patterns, understands complex menus and customer preferences and enables a more natural, seamless ordering experience.
• Computer vision-enhanced operations: Yum! Brands will deploy Nvidia-based computer vision technology to optimize drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management through real-time analytics and alerts.
• Accelerated restaurant intelligence: The company will utilize AI-driven analytics and agents to assess restaurant performance and generate personalized action plans for restaurant managers based on best practices from top-performing locations.

“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 & technology officer, Yum! Brands,  and president, 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 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.”