A Pizza Hut employee walks out of a restaurant with a black and red facade carrying two pizza boxes.
Pizza Hut is trying to develop its own AI technology to recommend food orders to customers based on the weather.
Carlos Becerra/Getty Images
  • Pizza Hut wants to use AI to recommend food to customers based on the weather, its data chief said.
  • Tristan Burns said Pizza Hut was building its own AI platform to better understand its customers.
  • Pizza Hut's machine-learning program is still in its early stages, Burns said.
  • See more stories on Insider's business page.

Pizza Hut plans to use AI tech to recommend orders to customers based on the weather in their location, the company's data chief told VentureBeat.

The restaurant chain is building its own in-house AI technology to understand more about what its customers want, Tristan Burns, Pizza Hut Digital Ventures' global head of analytics, told VentureBeat in an interview.

"Part of our machine learning program is to ingest customer behavior and a little bit about who customers are, where in the world they are, what the weather might be at their location, and then surface relevant product recommendations to them during their experience," Burns said, per VentureBeat.

Burns told VentureBeat that Pizza Hut was in the early stages of developing the technology.

He did not give details about how the weather would affect its recommendations.

Read more: How the team that rescued KFC brought their marketing and innovation strategy to Pizza Hut and crushed Domino's in sales growth last quarter

Burns added that Pizza Hut Digital Ventures, founded by the chain in 2016, had avoided buying off-the-shelf AI programs in favor of building a platform that is specific to its global business. The Digital Ventures team is focused on digitizing customers' experience, according to its LinkedIn page.

Other restaurant chains have invested in AI technology in recent years, for different reasons. For example, in 2019 McDonald's bought AI voice-recognition technology Apprente to speed up orders at its drive-thrus. It had tested the system at 10 restaurants, its CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a July earnings call.

In March, Yum! brands - the $40 billion parent company of Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell - announced in a press release that it would acquire AI firm Kvantum to better study its customers' behavior.

Pizza Hut did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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