Interviews, IT, DevOps & Business

Pizza Hut: Looking at IoT from the customers’ perspective

Meysam Moradpour
Director Digital Ventures, Pizza Hut

Prior to his talk at Rethink! Internet of Retail Minds Europe we had a chat with Meysam Moradpour – Director, Digital Ventures at Pizzahut. Meysam spent the past ten years in various digital roles around the world spanning from product management, digital marketing, business development, eCommerce and startup ventures. He moved to Pizza Hut in order to use his skills and enable the category leader also become the digital leader in the space.

Internet of Retail Minds: Where do you see the IoT and its technologies creating the most impact in the retail industry?

Meysam Moradpour: I see them creating the most value in terms of breaking barriers and generating new channels for commerce. The connected home and car will have huge impacts on everyday life in 3-5 years from now. Consumers will use appliances differently than today and it will help them to live healthier and save costs. IoT will create a network of billions of sensors that will monitor, guard and create many opportunities for retailers across continents.

What are the most critical pieces missing today that will be needed to support this sort of computational ubiquity and at the same time make your customers happy?

We’re missing the consensus of users to understand the value add of putting thousands of sensors in their houses and monitoring their every move. We need go-to use cases that will take this mainstream. Think of what Pokémon Go did for Augmented Reality. These use cases will come over the next five years.

Where do you see the biggest challenges in your field at the moment in terms of adoption of the IoT in retail?

There are two main barriers: Privacy and time. By putting sensors in your home and car, companies will invade users’ privacy in a way no one has ever done before. As always, there will be lots of concern and doubts but over time, with the right benefits created, these will go away.

The other barrier is simply time. IoT will require users to do things different than ever before and it will take time for users to change their old habits and become used to control their home and car with their voice and fingertips.

Will the IoT enable new business models or new business applications? How do they look like?

Yes, they will. Many of the things we use today could be improved by getting smart. If you just take the connected home and car as examples, there will be dozens of new business models emerging that will allow users to do and use applications in a way never seen before.

How are you at Pizza Hut implementing/taking advantage of the IoT?

We’re looking at IoT from our users’ perspective. We want to create applications and use cases that help them order, pick-up and get pizza delivered easier than today. By doing this, we can add true value for them and only then will they consider using these new applications/channels. One IoT example is Amazon’s Dash Button; it clearly solves a problem and offers an easy and seamless solution to its users.

Thank you for your time to participate in the interview!
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