Domino’s has lifted the lid on a technology it is banking on to help cut delivery times to under 10 minutes, revealing it uses artificial intelligence to decide whether to start making pizzas before they are ordered.

As customers are adding pizzas and side dishes to their online shopping carts, the AI tool crunches the numbers, working out the probability of them completing the order, chief digital officer Michael Gillespie says.

If the odds look sufficiently good, stores will begin to prepare the food even before the customer has clicked to confirm their order.

“That means you can have orders coming out of an oven as payments are being completed and orders getting to customers faster than our ovens can cook,” Gillespie says.

He would not confirm the “magic sauce” that its algorithms can use to decide whether to begin preparing pizzas, for example whether it is partly determined by the customers’ previous order completion rates.

But stores had achieved ‘high 90’s’ and sometimes 100 per cent accurate predictions over a period of days, he says.

“It would be things like the type of products, where they are added in the ordering process and other elements that we can draw on through our machine-learning technology.”

If the software gets it wrong, and the customer fails to complete or changes their order, there should be a silver lining for someone.

Unordered pizzas can be given out to other customers as a bonus or donated to individuals or charities through Domino’s “Feed the Knead” community programme.

“In the instance that a pizza has gone through that wasn't finalised by the customer, we would never waste that pizza,” a spokeswoman says.

“It would never just be put in the bin.”

AI is one of the tools that Domino’s is relying on to achieve the ambitious ‘3Ten’ goal it set in 2016 of enabling customers to pick up pizzas within three minutes of placing an order or delivering them to their home in 10 minutes.

The focus on speed reflects the fact that Domino’s knows one of the main reasons customers opt for pizza is to get food fast, “especially if they have had a tough day in the office or are looking for an easy meal for their family”, Gillespie says.

“We're in the ‘age of delivery’ and more and more customers are looking for convenience.”

Despite it taking an average of five to six minutes to cook a pizza, Domino’s Yotsuya Yonchome store in Japan set a “new benchmark” for delivering pizzas in a time averaging 2 minutes 38 seconds from order placement over an entire week in 2019, a spokeswoman says.

The equivalent record in Australia, set in Ferny Grove, Brisbane, is 5 minutes 27 seconds, she says.

However, any suggestion that Domino’s is close to achieving those puzzlingly-fast speeds on a sustainable basis should probably be taken with a pinch of chilli salt.

The spokeswoman said the delivery records showed what was possible under “optimal conditions”.

“In these instances, stores took extra measures to help them achieve their goal including staffing up with additional team members, religiously using predictive ordering to get a head start, and utilising ‘runners’ to hustle orders out the door to delivery experts.”

Australian researcher Diligence Research reported in November 2020 that Domino’s average delivery times in Australia, including from its Ferny Grove store, were hovering around a still fast, but not quite so eye-watering time of a little over 20 minutes.

Domino’s latest annual report states that it delivered pizzas from its 790 stores in Japan in an average of 16 minutes and 10 seconds last year, with one store achieving an average of 10 minutes and 22 seconds.

A store in Paris achieved an annual average delivery time of 12 minutes and 7 seconds, it also said.

Domino’s 3Ten initiative isn’t the only example of the company trying to lift its performance through what might be described as overtly aspirational goals.

In 2016, Domino’s expressed the hope it would also be regularly using drones to deliver pizzas in New Zealand within “a couple of years”.

Sceptics who doubted that would be achievable in the timeframe have been proved correct, but Domino’s has announced it will carry out more trials with its drone partner Flirtey later this year.