Papa Johns serves up pizza to more than 150 million customers around the globe. Their recipe for success includes data and AI infrastructure that powers voice orders, delivery tracking, user personalization, and continually improved ordering processes.

“If you’ve worked in a pizza store, especially a Friday or Saturday night, it’s controlled chaos,” says Kevin Vasconi, Chief Digital and Technical Officer at Papa Johns International. “Anything we can do to make the team members’ and managers’ lives easier is going to have huge benefits for them, and that team member satisfaction actually translates into customer satisfaction.”

“One of the challenges we all face in the QSR industry is how do we continue to surprise and delight our customer?” says Vasconi. “The technology stakes get higher every year, and in our business, being quick to market is a competitive differentiator.”

The Food Ordering agent lets Papa Johns customers use natural language ordering across mobile devices—and eventually, kiosks and in-car systems. Digital consumers are very sophisticated, points out Vasconi, and bring high expectations for fast, simple transactions and interactions.

Beyond speed, the Papa Johns team wanted the ability to offer value to customers in the way that matters to them. For one person, the value might be a lightning-quick transaction. Another might want to go through the menu and discover something they haven’t seen before. And still another wants the best deal in the industry.

“Companies being successful have embraced this idea that quality is more than the finished product—it’s the experience,” says Vasconi. “We pride ourselves on looking at every transaction as order to delivery, making sure we hit the quality mark every step of the way.”

The AI agent Papa Johns is using is part of Gemini Enterprise’s customer experience capabilities. The Food Ordering agent, closely related to the Shopping agent, is multimodal, meaning it can incorporate different types of input, such as text, voice, and images, to autonomously build shopping carts and execute consented actions. This multimodal ability includes natural language processing, so Papa Johns customers can simply speak their order, creating a “no-tap” functionality. The agent also offers recommendations and looks for relevant coupons for every order by default.

Early Agent Platform adoption has provided productivity gains along with the improvements for customers.

“When we talk about introducing any technology, the most important thing to do is to make sure that the group using the technology understands the value that it's going to add,” says Vasconi. “How is this going to make their job easier? How is this going to make them more profitable? How is this going to increase customer satisfaction? We always start with what's in it for the consumer, what's in it for the associates in our store, and make sure that they understand why we're doing this.”

All the data from the front-end applications and ordering process go into BigQuery, so that the analytics can create a feedback loop to improve the next customer experience. That might be adding personalization for the customer or finding the right upsell opportunities, or taking into account new information from the customer, such as that they want vegetarian options in the order. The Papa Johns team also uses BigQuery’s capabilities to micro-segment the customer database to create more targeted offers. The back-end infrastructure creates an easy ordering experience that customers have enjoyed.

“This takes a very stressful pizza ordering experience for my daughter’s soccer team and turns it into a fun experience,” says Vasconi. “More importantly, when you actually bring the pizza to the soccer team, they have enough pizza, they're the right pizzas, and the girls are happy, which is what’s most important.”

In addition, BigQuery and CloudSQL paired with Agent Platform have helped streamline and increase the use of data analytics throughout the company.

“Our analytics are better than they’ve ever been,” says Vasconi.

Papa Johns also incorporates Google Maps into its platform, so employees can see when an order left the store and when it arrived at its destination, plus the route between the two. Customers also like to use the map feature to see where their pizza order is along the way.

“With our focus on the customer, we're always trying to find new and innovative ways to interact with them,” says Vasconi. “So when we were introduced to Agent Platform, we immediately started thinking about, how could we use that to surprise and delight the customer?”

Vasconi credits the Google Cloud ecosystem, and participation in early adopter programs, with helping Papa Johns’ engineers get new technology to market quickly.

“At Papa Johns our saying is ‘Better ingredients, better pizza,’” Vasconi says. “It’s more than just a saying—it’s our culture. We strive every day to make the best products in the market and in the digital world.”