These Fast Food Restaurants Are About To Take A Major Leap Into AI Technology

Fans of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut should get ready for these restaurants to fully embrace artificial intelligence. Parent company Yum! Brands announced in a press release on Tuesday that it is partnering with the tech company Nvidia to infuse Yum's biggest brands with AI technology. The idea is to use AI-powered order-taking, restaurant assessments, and computer vision — a term for using AI to train computers to interpret the visual world through a camera network — to scale the brand's existing proprietary Byte by Yum! platform. 

Some customers may have already noticed changes from the Byte platform go into effect: Yum! Brands is already piloting its new AI footprint at several Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations. Now the company plans a larger rollout to over 500 total restaurants by the end of June 2025. Additionally, Yum! Brands will directly own the data gathered from its Nvidia partnership, allowing it to customize the AI model as needed.

Yum! Brands is not the only fast food giant to embrace AI. McDonald's is exploring the tech's possibilities with Google Cloud, while Wendy's has partnered with Palantir on supply chain improvements.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more common in the fast food industry. But an AI-powered restaurant can mean many things, from large language models in the drive-thru to robotic arms in the kitchen. Restaurants have also used AI to check order accuracy, schedule workers, and make supply orders, all with an eye on reducing inefficiencies and increasing profit.

Although AI has afforded the fast food industry some benefits, it comes with drawbacks as well. For instance, AI-powered drive-thrus are one of the signs that have us worried about Wendy's future, due to customers' numerous, sustained complaints about Wendy's FreshAI either making mistakes with their orders or not being able to understand them at all.

Fast food AI can also mean fewer available jobs. When restaurants introduce AI, particularly to focus on simple, repetitive tasks, that's work that a human could theoretically be doing instead. According to the press release, however, the AI integration at Yum! Brands restaurants will make employee jobs easier, not eliminate them. Joe Park, the chief digital and technology officer at Yum! Brands, Inc., and president of Byte by Yum! said, "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."