So you should get a tarantula, and as if that alone weren’t absurd enough, an eight-legged specimen of this species can be seen in the online advertisement. Accompanied by the note that these spiders are underrated and harmless pets. But why in the world are they showing you this ad? You think about it for a moment, and then it occurs to you that you said “tarantula” exactly once in the presence of the cell phone and wished – but only incidentally – that someone you knew fell into a pit with these animals. It’s creepy, and it’s also a little ridiculous: So the tech industry has picked up a word, and the algorithm clearly can’t think of anything better than to turn it into an ad. For a spider as a pet for someone who is almost terrified of the eight-legged crawlers.
Sure, machine learning will improve over time, and that leads to the Pizza Hut restaurant chain. Its chief analyst Tristan Burns recently said at the transform tech conference that his company is currently experimenting with machine learning and wants to learn, as he said: “Who the customers are, where in the world they are, what the weather is like there is.” Wait a minute, and this is being debated and smiled a bit in the USA: Pizza Hut wants to make customers individual offers based on the weather forecast? So “Veggie Lover” in the sunshine, “Backyard BBQ Chicken” in the rain and the chicken-bacon-parmesan-with-cheese-in-the-rim variant by hail? Yes, it could be, but in reality it’s about the delivery conditions. What a car without a driver doesn’t like at all: clouds or even rain.
It’s exciting to see what’s happening in the live delivery industry that Pizza Hut has been the digital pioneer; As early as 1994, customers in California were able to order pizza on the Internet – and let’s be honest: if you order your meal by phone for a year and don’t go crazy, you can be considered enlightened in the Buddhist sense. The industry has grown almost exponentially during the Covid pandemic, with sales of $ 127 billion worldwide this year, and where so much money is on the move, the tech industry is wide awake.
Pizza Hut competitor Domino’s already described itself in 2014 as a “tech company that happens to be selling pizza”; Pizza Hut relied on outsourcing and cooperated with the delivery agent Grubhub. Since 2015, Domino’s customers have been able to have their pizza delivered anywhere, for example in parks or on the beach. In 2016, the company delivered two pizzas (a Peri-Peri Chicken Pizza and a Chicken and Cranberry Pizza – the sun was shining) by drone.
In an advertising film, Pizza Hut shows how they imagine the future: a car from the start-up Nuro (which cooperates with the supermarket chain Walmart and the pharmacy-drugstore group CVS) drives to a branch without a pilot, an employee places the ordered items Put things in a kind of holding oven on the side of the vehicle, and then the R2 (a certainly deliberate reference to the Star Wars robot R2-D2) defies some of the dangers of road traffic, finds the faster route in a traffic jam and brings the customer a crispy, hot pizza. A few of these R2 vehicles are already being tested on the streets of Houston.
It could be a revolution
“There is still a lot to learn,” says Dominos digital boss Dennis Maloney: “But it could be a revolution.” Anyone who dreams of one day that a car will transport people from A to B without a pilot (and all the way) should pay close attention to the delivery industry. Experts believe that it will be there sooner than other branches of industry because it transports things instead of people. So there is only one thing left for the customers and the learning machines to do: If no one says “pizza” and “pineapple” in the same breath, the algorithm could end the worst crime against southern taste buds and finally let this unspeakable Hawaiian pizza become extinct. At most there will be one with tarantula legs.