Dive Brief:
- Papa Johns announced Thursday a partnership with Google Cloud to use Google data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence chatbots in its ordering and delivery processes.
- Papa Johns expects the partnership to increase ticket size, frequency and customer satisfaction scores while reducing the cost of customer service.
- The pizza chain has created an “innovation team,” called PJX, to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the partnership.
Dive Insight:
Papa Johns’ PJX team will pursue at least five key projects as the tech arms race heats up among QSR heavyweights. The most interesting of those strategic priorities is the deployment of a Google Cloud-based point-of-sale system, which Papa Johns said will set the stage for AI-driven dispatching, delivery route optimization and automation of unspecified restaurant processes.
PJX will try to anticipate customer needs and use Google BigQuery, Vertex AI and Gemini to “proactively suggest orders through push notifications or email, based on learned customer preferences and anticipated needs,” the company said.
The pizza brand will also feed its internal data into Google’s generative AI tools to improve personalization of its web and app experiences by “presenting unique discount codes or advertisements based on previous orders, customer preferences, location and more,” in real time.
Additionally, Papa Johns said the partnership would help it predict ordering behaviors and generate AI-powered marketing campaigns.
Papa Johns will turn over much of its customer experience management to AI bots. The pizza chain plans to integrate AI-voice ordering into its app and “build an AI-powered chatbot that can handle common customer inquiries, seamlessly escalating complex issues to live agents.”
Whether the use of chatbots will actually improve consumer experiences is open to question. AI chatbots have a documented tendency to invent inaccurate information.
The computational demands of AI have driven up greenhouse gas emissions at Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. Bloomberg has reported the energy intensity of AI data centers is endangering corporate climate commitments. According to Papa Johns’ 2024 Corporate Responsibility Report, the pizza brand is committed to sustainably managing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental concerns.
Papa Johns did not immediately respond to a request for comment on AI’s accuracy and emissions problems, or on whether generative AI represented a qualitative improvement on other forms of data analytics.
Same-store sales at the pizza brand have been uneven in recent years, ranging from positive 3% in Q3 2023 to negative 6% in Q3 2024. To combat this, CEO Todd Penegor, who joined the brand from Wendy’s in mid-2024, is pushing the brand to focus on its core pizzas and to improve its market density through development.
If the AI partnership is successful at raising tickets and transactions, or if it lowers the cost of customer service for the brand, it could help Papa Johns focus on its core strategies.
Papa Johns is one of many restaurant companies looking to cash in on the AI boom. Yum Brands recently signed a deal with Nvidia, a major AI developer, to build more analytics and AI tools. Wendy’s is speeding up the deployment of drive-thru voice AI. And Hi Auto, a QSR-focused voice AI tech firm, recently announced a $15 million funding round to help it develop and deploy its AI tools.
