Papa Johns wants AI to transform pizza ordering

Waylon Cunningham

Thu, Apr 3, 2025, 5:04 AM 2 min read

By Waylon Cunningham

(Reuters) - Papa John's International wants to inject artificial quality exertion into however its customers bid pizza done an expanded concern with Google Cloud, the concatenation said connected Thursday.

The company's program is to enactment a personalized interaction - based connected past lawsuit behaviour and different discourse - onto telephone propulsion notifications suggesting orders, selling emails, and loyalty programme offerings. It volition besides adhd a caller online chatbot and the quality to bid done virtual assistants.

The announcement marks the latest by a accelerated nutrient institution to tout AI exertion arsenic a mode to boost income and lawsuit service, and streamline operations.

"The advances successful exertion are allowing america to bash things that we couldn't bash 3 oregon 4 years ago," said Kevin Vasconi, Papa Johns' main integer officer. "Some of it is astir scalability, immoderate of it is astir security, immoderate of it is, rather honestly, astir cost."

The usage cases announced Thursday are akin to what galore large edifice companies person done for years to marque usage of their reams of income data.

"We've fallen down successful galore respects, but there's a large accidental to drawback up accelerated and reclaim immoderate of our tech leadership," said Todd Penegor, who was hired arsenic Papa Johns main enforcement year. The pizza institution was the archetypal nationalist pizza concatenation to marque online ordering disposable to each U.S. customers erstwhile it did truthful successful 2001.

Penegor was antecedently Wendy's CEO, wherever helium presided implicit different concern with Google Cloud to bring AI exertion to the burger chain's drive-throughs. Penegor said that concern was instructive, and astatine Papa John's, helium hired the main tech serviceman helium worked alongside astatine Wendy's, Kevin Vasconi.

Vasconi besides oversaw a tech translation astatine Domino's Pizza wherever helium served arsenic the apical tech person from 2012 to 2020.

In the future, Penegor and Vasconi said the concatenation intends to rotation retired much AI progams to assistance in-store operations, specified arsenic helping program transportation routes and number store inventories.

(Reporting by Waylon Cunningham; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)