Yum! Brands' Chief Data Officer: AI Flywheel Is Creating 'A Powerful Data Moat'

At Yum! Brands, the most significant competitive advantage isn't the latest AI tool. It's the company's recent move to become a tech pioneer in its own right. With the singular goal of solving real problems for franchisees, Yum! developed a proprietary system to undercut third-party vendors' market share. Driven by the conviction that its technology is built by restaurateurs, for restaurateurs, Yum! is creating a defensible moat that separates it from most off-the-shelf solutions.

Among the leaders guiding this transformation is Cameron Davies, Yum! Brands' Chief Data Officer. His playbook for leveraging data at massive scale was created over two decades inside some of the world's most complex consumer companies. Prior to joining Yum!, Davies served as SVP of Corporate Decision Sciences at NBCUniversal, leading content personalization and monetization efforts. Before that, he spent nearly 17 years at The Walt Disney Company, where he established and ran the corporate Center of Excellence for Management Science and led global Yield Management for its resorts. Today, Davies brings the forecasting and optimization skills he honed in those high-stakes roles to the restaurant industry.

"The best advice I give to everybody, and what we've tried to do at Yum!, is really start with the business problems first, not the technology. Try to understand what the opportunities are, what the payback is, how hard they are to achieve, and then apply the right technology and Occam's Razor: the minimally complex thing you can do to drive that value," Davies said.

• No data, no AI: Yum!'s antidote is a guiding principle Davies learned fifteen years ago from his friend Manoj Saxena, the first GM of IBM Watson. Start with the business problem and tackle two of the biggest obstacles, he explained. "The number one challenge is always the data. No data, no AI. The second thing is change management, which is all about people. If you start with the business problem first, you start to minimize the change management challenge."

• The flywheel effect: It's all part of a single, unified system Davies called the "AI Flywheel." Powered by the company's proprietary "Byte by Yum!" technology platform, it creates a sort of "virtuous cycle," he explained. "The more services you own, the more data you get. The more data you get, the better your AI. The better your AI, the better the experience on those services. The better the service experiences, the more people use the services, and it starts all over again."