Case Study: From Dough to Drones — AI-Powered Technology Scouting at a National Pizza Chain

Technology has long been a competitive advantage in the fast-food industry. Over time, leading brands pulled ahead by making ordering, fulfillment, and delivery faster, cheaper, and more convenient. The pandemic only accelerated this shift, rewarding companies that had already invested in digital and mobile experiences.

Our client, a national pizza delivery chain, found itself lagging behind a key competitor — a major restaurant brand that had repositioned itself as a technology company that happens to sell pizza. Years of incremental investment had left the organization behind the curve, and pressure was mounting to modernize quickly. Speed mattered not only for customers, but also for investor confidence and brand relevance.

The challenge was clear: how to rapidly identify and adopt the right technologies — without betting on hype, overwhelming teams with research, or increasing execution risk.

Moving Beyond Incremental Innovation

At a critical crossroads, the company could continue relying on incumbent vendors and incremental upgrades — an approach that had already failed to deliver meaningful results. Instead, the organization chose to take a more disciplined approach by partnering with Traction Technology and leveraging the Traction AI-powered Innovation Management Platform.

Traction provided a centralized system to scout, evaluate, and compare emerging technologies, while embedding AI directly into the discovery and evaluation workflows to accelerate insight generation and improve decision quality.

AI-Assisted Technology Scouting Across Key Domains

Using Traction, the innovation team launched a structured technology scouting effort across multiple domains tied directly to business outcomes, including:

• Mobile applications to improve customer experience and increase repeat business
• Automation technologies to accelerate order fulfillment and reduce labor costs
• Employee training platforms to improve consistency and retention
• Workforce scheduling solutions to balance flexibility and operational certainty
• Conversational AI to streamline ordering and customer interactions

Traction AI played a critical role by:

• Synthesizing market and vendor research across each category
• Surfacing relevant startups and enterprise-ready vendors faster than manual search
• Reducing noise by filtering out solutions that did not meet baseline requirements

This allowed the team to move from broad exploration to focused shortlists in a fraction of the time.

AI-Enabled Evaluation and Shortlisting

Rather than relying on subjective opinions or vendor-led demos, Traction enabled the team to evaluate technologies consistently and defensibly.

Traction AI supported evaluations by:

• Enriching vendor profiles with external market and technology context
• Comparing solutions against defined criteria such as scalability, cost, risk, and operational fit
• Highlighting tradeoffs and gaps across shortlisted options

Human decision-makers remained in control, but AI reduced manual research effort and ensured evaluations were grounded in evidence rather than intuition alone.

Separating Signal From Noise

One of the most valuable outcomes of using Traction AI was the ability to distinguish practical, near-term solutions from speculative ideas.

The platform helped the company:

• Focus on technologies with clear operational impact and ROI
• Avoid hype-driven concepts, such as drone-based pizza delivery, that lacked feasibility
• Align innovation investments with budget, risk tolerance, and execution readiness

At the same time, Traction surfaced credible opportunities that supported both customer experience and brand storytelling — including AI-driven ordering experiences and enhanced mobile loyalty programs.

Results: Faster Decisions, Lower Risk, Stronger Competitive Positioning

By leveraging Traction and Traction AI together, the company transformed a slow, fragmented discovery process into a repeatable, AI-assisted innovation workflow.

The result was:

• Faster technology discovery and evaluation
• Reduced research and evaluation overhead
• More confident, defensible decisions
• A stronger competitive position in a rapidly evolving market

What had once been a slow, aging organization became a more agile, future-ready business — capable of adopting new technologies with speed and discipline.

Why It Matters

This case demonstrates the value of combining AI-assisted intelligence with structured innovation workflows.

Traction didn’t just help the company find new technologies — it helped them decide which technologies were worth pursuing, and do so with confidence.

‍

Learn more about the  Top 20 Emerging Technologies That Could Transform Your Industry ‍

For more information

Discover how Traction Technology can help you modernize faster to increase competitiveness and profitability. 

●     Explore our software and Who We Serve.

●     Download our brochure: How to Evaluate Enterprise Startups.

●     Get in touch to learn more Request more info.

●     Schedule a demo.