Domino’s Pizza announced last week that the company is partnering with Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service to create a generative AI assistant that can help improve both employee and customer service. While specific details of the five-year project will be announced over the next six to 18 months, Kelly Garcia, Domino’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, was able to provide some insight on how the AI project will help improve employees’ jobs and personalize customer experience in the near future.

“We’re broadening on how this new, quickly-moving technology can change the pattern of online ordering in a meaningful way,” Garcia said. “It won’t just be a chatbot—it’s going to be bigger than that…When you’re dealing with this cutting-edge technology and trying to blend these experiences in ways that people haven’t thought of, it’s all about the trajectory toward hyper-personalization and making a meaningful impact on how customers order.”

Garcia said that the AI technology will be a mix of proprietary and non-proprietary technology in partnership with Microsoft, in which the company’s own personalized, in-house technology will be overlaid on top of the Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI interface. The project will begin, he said, with the relaunch of the Domino’s website, which will be used to kickstart the improvement of the customer personalization experience, with the help of AI.

“Not just us but many retailers are trying to figure out how to leverage generative AI to lean into hyper-personalization and see where we can remove friction from the customer experience, which would lead to increases in tickets and more importantly—them coming back,” Garcia said. “We’ve long-believed that natural language mixed with traditional e-commerce experience is a big unlock…the only thing that’s changed now is the technology has actually caught up.”

The most expansive AI capabilities Domino’s will invest in will be the invisible back of house technology, so that employees will be able to make decisions like labor scheduling, inventory management, and day-to-day operations management.

“With turnover the way it is in retail… we really need to make decision making much simpler for our team members to execute,” Garcia said. “The ability for our team members to get information quickly to make infored decisions more quickly… All of those things that take a level of expertise, and can add up to meaningful numbers when small mistakes are made, just make the jobs easier to do.”

Garcia added that if employee experience improves, then it does trickle on into the front of house, because then order times will shorten and customer experience will improve once you have these machine-backed resources.

Domino’s is jumping on this technology early because, Garcia said, he thinks it’s crucial to be an early adapter and not get left behind.

“We have to think about the way that this technology can be best utilized to drive customer satisfaction and efficiencies in our stores,” he said. “This is moving so fast, that if we’re not learning at the pace that it’s actually being developed, we will be left behind…. I can’t 100% say yet what all the outcomes will be, but us being experts in the space on the cutting edge with a partner like Microsoft will increase the likelihood of really fantastic results for our franchisees, customers and team members.”

Original Article:
[H/T] RestaurantBusinessOnline.com