Pizza Hut Wants To Ask The Weather To Pick Your Next Pizza
Photo ID 158522859 © Rolandm | Dreamstime.com
Pizza Hut has plans to deliver the optimal meal of all-encompassing cheesy goodness, depending on what the weather is like. Yes, that’s quite a lot to swallow.
Tristan Burns, global head of analytics at Pizza Hut, revealed this piece of news in an interview with VentureBeat early this month.
Using a custom artificial intelligence (AI) platform, the company hopes to transform meteorological predictions into culinary predictions, recommending its customers the “best” menu items to order when it’s raining, snowing, or sunshine all around.
“We’re in the early stages of an AI journey,” Burns shares in the interview. “Part of our machine learning program is to ingest customer behavior and a little bit about who customers are.”
The “little bit” encompasses things like their location, and what the weather is like there. It hasn’t been specified if this machine learning program is limited to customers who place their orders online, or if it’s also applicable to the brick-and-mortar pizza restaurants.
But what we do know is that Burns has said that it’s “a very, very data-centric and very customer-centric approach.”
A Pizza Hut spokesperson has also clarified a little more about the plan in an email to Gizmodo. They’ve said that Pizza Hut, and its parent company, Yum! won’t collect precise information like names, addresses, and locations. Instead, it will use a customer profile consisting of gender information, general location, and order history.
As for the machine learning, the representative said that Pizza Hut will go off patterns of orders. For example, if customers in London tend to order stuffed crust pizzas on rainy days, then the company will be able to recognize this.
So, when it rains in London and the surrounding areas, the website will automatically recommend stuffed crust goodness to browsing customers.
Ultimately, what the tool suggests depends on what people are ordering. Well, that’s certainly one way to cater to your customers.
[via Gizmodo, image via photo ID 158522859 © Rolandm | Dreamstime.com]
Also check out these recent news
