Domino’s Pizza continues to implement innovative technology to maintain it’s competitive edge in the pizza business. Domino’s ran ads over the summer promoting Hotspots where you could have pizza delivered to over 150,000 locations.
The company has also been on the cutting edge of technology in its use of autonomous vehicles that are actually delivering pizza in Las Vegas. You can watch a video from a customer of a Domino’s driverless car delivering a pizza below. Domino’s is also testing AI natural voice systems in some of its corporate stores and just recently rolled out a voice inventory app.
Ritch Allison, CEO of Domino’s, recently discussed their strategy of innovation and technology with CNBC’s Jim Cramer:
Pizza is a really fragmented category. We’re the market share leader in pizza but we still only sell about one out of every six pizzas in the US. We’re staying focused on our strategy, and our execution and not really on the short-term up and downs of any one particular competitor (such as Papa John’s). If we stay focused on the things that we’ve been doing then we’re going to continue to take share from competitors small and large across the industry.
The Hotspot ads we ran this summer were terrific. It’s just another great way that we’re engaging our customers. A lot of restaurant players and a lot of players in pizza our constant members in the product of the month club and we got out of that club a long time ago and started focusing on things that were interesting and innovative that we could do to engage our customers.
Hotspots is another one of those because it shows our customers we’re so crazy about pizza that we’re going to take their pizza to them any time, any place, they want to get it.
We’re working on a lot of things, autonomous vehicles are certainly one thing that we’ve been working on. We’ve talked about DOM, our artificial intelligence natural voice system. We’re still piloting that in some of our corporate stores. It’s learning, it’s growing, it’s getting better.
We just recently rolled out within our stores a voice inventory app that our team members can use for one of the most unpleasant tasks they have which are at the end of a shift they’ve got to go count the food that we have in the walk-in cooler and this makes that job easier and faster for them well.