𝐀 𝐩𝐢𝐳𝐳𝐚 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭

$1,000 invested in Domino's at its 2004 IPO was worth about $56,000 by early 2020. The same bet on Google? About $35,000. (CNBC)

Domino's didn't have better pizza. In 2009, it ran ads admitting its own product tasted like cardboard!

What it had was a different self-definition. Its CEO called Domino's "a tech company that sells pizza."

That was not an empty statement. Look at what it built:

→ 2014: DOM, the first voice assistant to complete a retail sale. Years before most of us spoke to Alexa.
→ "AnyWare" ordering: by text, by a single pizza emoji, from your watch, your car, your TV.
→ Pizza Tracker: live GPS, so you watch the order instead of the clock.
→ 2019: DOM Pizza Checker: a ceiling camera that uses computer vision enabled by Nvidia chips to grade every pizza before it leaves the store. It lifted quality scores 15% and has scanned over 50 million pies.
→ 2023: a Microsoft partnership putting generative AI into managers' hands for inventory, ordering and scheduling.

Today, more than 70% of Domino's sales are digital. It runs a bigger technology operation than any other part of the company.

Here is the part many leaders talking the AI game miss.

Domino's never sold AI. Nobody orders "AI pizza." They order pizza.

The technology is invisible. It lives in the operations: the ordering, the routing, the quality control, the data. AI is the lever. Never the product.

That is the real playbook for retail and luxury right now.

The losers announce "AI initiatives." A pilot here, a chatbot there. Theatre for the board deck.

The winners do what Domino's has been doing. Rebuild the boring middle — supply chain, fulfilment, customer data, quality — around AI, while still selling the same thing they always sold.

Your customer should never see the machine. They should only notice the friction is gone from their interaction with your brand.

The pizza didn't change. The company underneath it did. The result? Domino's holds roughly half the U.S. pizza-delivery market.

So the question for your business isn't "what's our AI strategy?"

It's this: are you a [your industry] company — or a technology company that happens to sell [your product]?

Only one of those answers compounds like Google.

#DominosPizza #AI #AugmentedRetail #DigitalTransformation #CustomerExperience

Contact

bruno.gentil@sherpaconsultingasia.com

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