Voice Over (00:00):

Welcome to the Taylor Ten. A fast-paced, 10 minute deep dive into the minds of those shaking up the marketing world, bringing you the sharpest insights, boldest ideas and breakthrough trends driving the industry forward. So tune in, get inspired, and stay ahead.

Christina Merritt (00:17):

Hello, I'm Christina Meritt and welcome to the Taylor Ten. I'm here with Taras Malyshev from Pizza Hut to learn as much as I can about how to stay human in the age of AI in only 10 minutes. So Taras, thank you so much for being here. You are the head of new business innovation at Pizza Hut, and I know you also had a similar role at Mondelez in your previous chapter when we met actually in Toronto, you won the International Innovation Award at the Trend Hunter Future Festival, which was a great moment and congrats again. I'm curious, can you tell me how you think about innovation in the year 2025 and especially the role that AI plays to test and learn?

Taras Malyshev (01:07):

Very good day, Christina, and thank you for having me. That's really a good question. I believe that we are in a stage of heightened positivity and super optimism right now. You can see that AI technologies are popping up for every imaginable task You have the voiceovers about the cleaning, the noise reduction. There is already agents that appear to help in different aspects of the job. So I believe that we are in a sandbox time right now. Everything you try is good and we play with it, and that's what I believe we should continue doing play and try to make it as much as possible. And I would say it's ultimately the awful or remove the routines that what we should be doing with AI right now. We need to remove the fear and increase the understanding of larger audiences to make the adoption even faster.

Christina Merritt (01:58):

So you say playing is good. Do you put any guardrails on your team in terms of how far they can go with that element of play?

Taras Malyshev (02:12):

We have a corporate guardrails. We have the tools, the internal tools and the enterprise licenses. That puts the guardrails and definitely you don't want to share with AI your financial reports or trade secrets of course, but playing and giving the ideations, creativity is something that you should do also, no one limits you to play it on a personal side. I truly believe that something we should be looking at. Yes, we have some questions about data at syn on a corporate level, but there are still ways to generate a question or to try some task automation like let's say write me a plot or help me with approaching a personal, clear the noise of the message or be my brainstorm body or see me like, Hey, what do you think about this book or that book? That's something we can do today.

Christina Merritt (03:11):

So tell me how do you find the right balance in your personal life, but also as a leader at Pizza Hut.

Taras Malyshev (03:20):

We truly see that there is a question, will I be replaced by AI? There is a fear rising up and definitely every technology brings some sense of removing the human aspect of it. Think about the calculator. It has removed the aspect of calculating things, mental math and all of these skill traits, and now AI, what going to happen? And honestly, I have always been into it early in my careers, I've created the first programs that automated how Excel communicates with SAP and all of this technical stuff and system thinking, system development has always been a big case. But with AI rising, I've been studying as the professor of economics getting another degree, and that's where I've realized that people's behavior influence a lot, the dynamics of the systems and the economists of the regions. With AI, we don't have enough data to train AI to surpass the human thinking or the human ability.

(04:27):

The biggest limitation is actually the amount of data we have created. And it's a question, the more data we create to train it, the more smarter it becomes. But then the question becomes, can it become smarter than people? Because to train it needs more data. And that is definitely where I see people side comes into play. AI can do execution today, but what questions do we ask? How do we use it? Where do we use it, how we leverage it, and do we use it to help people around or do something different? That's on us and that's our internal questions and internal, the base that should come around. I believe that social technologies is something we should be putting in place. I use it a lot actually to understand better myself. Sometimes when I talk with AI and giving a masculine, give me different perspectives what another person could think of my message, am I enough relatable?

(05:29):

And that helps to give different view on yourself. So that's how I'm using to be a better leader, even with my kids sometimes like, Hey, do you think this phrase that I'm using is appropriate for a five-year old or I may simplify it somehow? Definitely technology is here and technology removes some aspects of what we call humanity today, but it doesn't mean that we cannot find ways to use it to make us more humane and understand ourselves more so these days I spend much more time on psychology and understanding how people make decisions, how they think on philosophy. Actually these philosophical questions. That's I believe what will help us use AI even better than we do today.

Christina (06:16):

I love this AI as a mentor actually something that can help you with your own psychology, your parenting, your leadership style. I think that's actually not being talked about enough. So maybe playing it back to you at Pizza Hut, can you give me a more tangible example of how you balance technology and humanity in your innovation model and the global systems that you have set up?

Taras (06:47):

I want to start with referencing an organization Yum has created that is called Byte by Yum!, that manages all our AI driven platforms. And there are several examples how they're doing it already today, for example, at Taco Bell, they enable a rich customer experiences. They speed up operations, integrating online ordering, point of sale that learns helps you make a better decision, choose the right product. We have another chatbot or AI system that helps employees improve their wellbeing, how they operate, improve the operations, be better. There is always good when you can talk to someone and saying, Hey, I'm doing things right, is it the way that I should be doing? And definitely overall the operations efficiency that is analyzed by ai, that's also what we integrate. So I believe the technologies is there to improve not only just the operations of kitchens, but also the experience of the customer and experience of employee. It's important to connect all of this human aspects together to make it work.

Christina Merritt (08:00):

Do you have a prediction either for the rest of the year or more long-term on AI? How are we going to continue to evolve responsibly?

Taras Malyshev (08:14):

I definitely see that we'll face an acceleration of a chaos and what I'm talking about, the chaos is the speed of change, right? That's what we call chaos is when predictability is going down and we live in more unpredictable world, that's where the need of calibration, decentralized decision making will rise. And the demand for fluid corporate structures will definitely increase. And that's where I encourage everyone to look at the ai. If you want my prediction for this year or advice for this year, start looking for people with non-traditional careers and beyond typical thinking. Pay attention to what questions they ask themselves from the world and from the companies and of fast they adopt because adaptability and ability to change the way structures work, like making decisions move from consensus to something more like consent, whether it's good enough, safe enough to try and making sure that it stays within guardrails. It doesn't harm people, doesn't harm data, doesn't harm companies. That is where I'm seeing the world is going.

Christina Merritt (09:23):

Thank you so much, Taras. This was an amazing conversation full of interesting provocations. I think we are all curious how the rest of the year unfolds and how this technology will continue to challenge all of us.

Taras Malyshev (09:39):

Thank you, Christine. I really appreciate the quality of questions that you put together. So I clearly see that you are thinking beyond today, into tomorrow, so I really appreciate the quality of this dialogue.