Domino’s has maintained that it won’t outsource delivery and will instead invest in its operations to make them more efficient and better for customers. Technology is central to this effort. Domino’s tested self-driving delivery vehicles built by Ford Motor Co. in Michigan and Miami, and will use a custom driverless fleet of cars made by autonomous-vehicle startup Nuro Inc. to shuttle pizzas in Houston later this year. In Australia and New Zealand, a Domino’s division began testing artificially intelligent cameras that photograph and grade each pie on different criteria, essentially performing a quality audit and, in theory, preventing a subpar pizza from reaching the customer’s door. And in the U.S., the company’s voice-recognition system, “Dom,” is automating telephone orders in about 40 stores.
"The least efficient thing that we do is to put four or five pounds of food in a 5,000-pound machine that was designed to protect four or five adults in the event of a catastrophic collision driven by a human being. You’ve seen us working on autonomous delivery. [The driverless vehicle we’re testing with Nuro is] a little smaller than a golf cart, with compartments that open up, which could be heated, could be chilled, can be configurable to our product. We’ve got to push aggressively to bring down the cost of delivering products over time. We’ve still got to see how [drone delivery] unfolds. In some settings, potentially out in a more rural environment, that could make some sense. But it’s pretty challenging to do it in an urban or even a suburban environment. I’m not sure that residents are going to be too excited about drones with cameras flying over their houses all the time either."
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