Using Google Cloud’s new agentic solution, Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, Papa Johns is the first restaurant to bring new omnichannel food ordering capabilities to market
NEW YORK, Jan. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today at NRF 2026, Papa Johns announced a major transformation of its digital ordering experience, designed to deliver speed, accuracy, and real-time personalization to its 150 million+ customers worldwide. The QSR leader is the first partner for Google Cloud’s newly expanded AI solution, Food Ordering agent, which is helping the pizza brand deploy a fully unified voice and text AI ordering system to remove friction across customer touchpoints. The Food Ordering agent is a part of Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, an agentic solution designed to bring commerce and customer service together on an intelligence backbone.
Moving beyond its initial success in drive-thru automation, Food Ordering agent is a comprehensive omnichannel platform that enables brands to deploy high-quality voice AI agents across mobile apps, websites, telephones, kiosks, and in-car systems. By serving as Google Cloud’s launch customer for these new capabilities, Papa Johns is establishing a new industry benchmark for the “agentic” customer experience.
“Papa Johns is a digitally-driven business and, as such, one of our strategic priorities is investing in our technology to deliver a more seamless experience across our assets and owned channels, better connect with our customers, and support greater efficiency across our operations by leveraging data and AI,” said Kevin Vasconi, chief digital and technology officer, Papa Johns. “Our partnership with Google Cloud embodies our commitment to doing exactly that. We’re using Google Cloud’s Food Ordering agent to reimagine what’s possible for our customers. This isn’t just an app update; it’s a fundamental shift in how our customers interact with our brand digitally, making it faster, smarter, and more seamless than ever before.”
With Food Ordering agent, Papa Johns has developed key features to improve the customer experience, including:
- Increasing sales through seamless offer navigation: The “Intelligent Deal Wizard” functions as a personal concierge that automatically applies the best value combinations and reduces cart abandonment. This builds immediate brand loyalty and accelerates the checkout process by removing the need for customers to leave the app to hunt for better promo codes.
- Automating complex orders with precision: The “Advanced Voice & Group Ordering” feature captures revenue from complicated, multi-person orders that traditionally required human intervention. The system handles natural language nuances and real-time modifications with ease, ensuring order accuracy even for the most complex requests.
- Seamless, no-tap reordering flow: The agent identifies Papa Rewards returning loyalty customers and proactively asks whether they want to reorder their most recent orders. Because many pizza customers often order the same items, enabling a speedy, convenient flow from opening the app to checking out is paramount.
“The retail industry is entering the era of agentic commerce, where AI is an engine for business value,” said Carrie Tharp, vice president of global solutions and industries at Google Cloud. “By being the first to deploy our omnichannel Food Ordering agent, Papa Johns is moving beyond the chatbot era to create a fluid, intelligent experience that meets hungry customers wherever they are, whether they are in their car, on an app, or at a kiosk.”
Papa Johns will be showcasing this technology at the Google Cloud booth 5507 at NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show in NYC, offering live demos of these new capabilities to attendees, and then to customers nationwide by the end of 2026.
About Papa Johns
Papa John’s International, Inc. (Nasdaq: PZZA) opened its doors in 1984 with one goal in mind: BETTER INGREDIENTS. BETTER PIZZA.® Papa Johns believes that using high-quality ingredients leads to superior quality pizzas. Its original dough is made of only six ingredients and is fresh, never frozen. Papa Johns tops its pizzas with real cheese made from mozzarella, pizza sauce made with vine-ripened tomatoes that go from vine to can in the same day and meat free of fillers. It was the first national pizza delivery chain to announce the removal of artificial flavors and synthetic colors from its entire food menu. Papa Johns is co-headquartered in Atlanta, Ga. and Louisville, Ky. and is the world’s third-largest pizza delivery company with more than 6,000 restaurants in approximately 50 countries and territories. For more information about the company or to order pizza online, visit www.PapaJohns.com or download the Papa Johns mobile app for iOS or Android.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.
SOURCE Google Cloud
