Yum Brands last yr launched personalized marketing campaigns driven by artificial intelligence, teasing an “AI factory” that leverages consumer data to enable its digital ecosystem. Last month, the corporate shared some early results from contained in the factory, which helped send greater than 200 million AI-generated communications which were as much as five-times simpler in comparison with traditional approaches, across KPIs including frequency and return on ad spend.
“Across the organization, AI is supercharging our marketing,” Yum CEO David Gibbs said on the corporate’s Q2 2025 earnings call. “This isn’t just marketing evolution, it is a revolution, and we’re only getting began.”
To participate in that revolution, Yum has worked to construct a foundational framework for AI, each at the parent company and at subsidiary brands including Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. Central to that foundation is a yearslong effort to harness the huge amounts of first-party data, which is now centralized in a consumer data program called Red360. Yum has over 140 million highly qualified, permissioned names — complete with transaction history — in Red360, about half of which come from Taco Bell.
“We imagine certainly one of our strongest competitive benefits is our scale, and we imagine that shows up if you happen to look at all of our brands,” said Cameron Davies, chief data officer at Yum, in an interview.
Yum’s overall AI strategy is targeted on three pillars of where the technology shows up: in interactions with consumers (in communications and the drive-thru, for instance), as a part of the corporate’s Byte suite of software solutions (which powers inventory and scheduling) and above-store operations. Davies compared the manager use of AI as analogous to the embrace of smartphones during a previous era marked by pages and BlackBerry devices.
“You cannot imagine life without [your smartphone], and we imagine that is where gen AI sits,” the manager said of technology that’s already getting used to push productivity at the company level.
Live más with AI
Yum sees AI-driven marketing efforts as a method to further optimize a digital ecosystem that accounted for 57% of the sales mix overall for the corporate. Separating out Taco Bell, digital accounted for 41% of the combination in Q2 2025 — a record high for the brand. During this era, AI-powered efforts helped boost CRM frequency and in-app recommendations for Taco Bell, per details shared by Yum. In other words, digital success for Taco Bell comes from working in close partnership with its parent company and truly embracing technology.
“One of the best gaps for brands is having capabilities, but not necessarily being really prepared to drive and champion change,” said Dane Mathews, chief digital and technology officer at Taco Bell. “Technology goes to power the relationships that buyers have with brands, period.”
Taco Bell has worked to construct technologies that meet a fervent consumer base that seeks to experience, be a part of and amplify the brand. Adding Yum’s AI infrastructure and technological tools to that approach accelerates the brand’s learnings because it looks to speak relevantly on a one-to-one basis.
“AI helps us try this and helping us make progress,” Mathews said. “Then we’re just moving across surfaces, across channels, whether it’s apps, kiosk or drive-thru … really attempting to strengthen and grow the relationships with our fans.”
At Taco Bell, AI seen as a method to drive business needs — not as a technology to make use of since it is buzzworthy amongst marketers and executives. The brand is using the tech on the “nitty-gritty” work overseen by brand marketers and digital marketing teams. For example, AI is starting to power the brand’s content workflow, in addition to help creative teams “expand the aperture” on their work, Mathews explained. But truly unlocking AI’s full potential requires transformation.
“If this really goes to vary the whole lot, meaning all of marketing has to vary. It means our mental models on how consumers engage and what they engage with has to vary,” Mathews said.
To help bring about that change, Taco Bell and Yum have worked to let go of assumptions through testing and experimentation. AI allows the corporate to check data sets in customer communications and quickly integrate learnings into its models. From there, Yum has the advantage of having the ability to apply learnings and models across its portfolio.
“Only the marketers that follow [AI] that … can structure their learning around experimentation are those which can be going to win,” Mathews said. “That’s the telltale sign of a change happening at scale.”
To in-house or not in-house
In the previous few years, Yum has aggressively acquired and partnered with corporations that make up its digital, AI-powered ecosystem. Determining whether to make use of in-house technology or not has been enabled by a filter that assesses if there may be existing tech that may do the work higher than Yum could in-house, if Yum is doing something unique with the tech and who can do the work faster and cheaper.
For example, Yum has an internal consumer intelligence engine that uses Red360 data to personalize upsell offers on digital kiosks; it was cheaper and faster for Yum to handle that internally. But on email and SMS personalization efforts, Yum partnered with OfferFit, an organization recently acquired by customer engagement platform Braze, because OfferFit had already built a reinforcement engine that it will take Yum several years to construct by itself.
That agnostic approach to in-house or external partnership has allowed Yum and its brands to resolve for business problems and give attention to an AI-powered flywheel that revolves around data, algorithms and experiences.
“This is not just about AI, it isn’t nearly digital. It’s about how that each one works along with great food and great operations,” Davies said. “That’s why we’re using it. It’s not about just being cool with gen AI — it’s about the way it suits together in the general strategy.”
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