Technology

Yum Brands partners with Nvidia for AI technology

Photo: Adobe Stock

March 25, 2025

Yum Brands has partnered with Nvidia to accelerate the development of AI technologies for its restaurants around the globe. Yum Brands, which in total has more than 61,000 locations, is Nvidia's first AI restaurant partner, according to a press release.

"At Yum, we have a bold vision to deliver leading-edge, AI-powered technology capabilities to our customers and team members globally," Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer, Yum Brands, Inc. and president, Byte by Yum!, said in the press release. "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."

Yum Brands and Nvidia with bring forth the following:

• Voice Automated Order-Taking AI Agents: Advancing drive-thru and call center operations with 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 natural, seamless ordering experience.
• Computer Vision Enhanced Operations: Deploying Nvidia-powered computer vision to optimize drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management through real-time analytics and alerts.
• Accelerated Restaurant Intelligence: Utilizing AI-driven analytics and agents to assess restaurant performance, generating personalized action plans for restaurant managers based on best practices from top-performing locations.

Yum Brands has 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 this year.

"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," Andrew Sun, global director of retail, CPG and QSR business development, Nvidia, added in the press release. "Working with Yum Brands' best-in-class Digital & 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."

Looking ahead, Yum! is expanding AI to help team members manage complex tasks, including AI agents that plan, reason and act to assist across restaurants. The intelligence built with the latest Nvidia software will be proprietary to Yum, giving the company full ownership to customize and evolve its technology stack. This will enable Yum to integrate more advanced AI models, such as large language models, into its operations and pave the way for innovative applications, including sentiment analysis and personalized customer interactions.