WMT Walmart Inc

By Sara Castellanos 

Walmart Inc.'s chief information officer is joining Yum Brands Inc. as the owner of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell aims to invest more in technology to improve food delivery.

Clay Johnson will be Yum's chief digital and technology officer, a newly created position, the company said Tuesday.

Mr. Johnson, 49 years old, is leaving Walmart after bolstering its use of cloud computing. His departure comes a few months after Walmart merged its consumer-facing and internal technology teams under a new role held by Suresh Kumar, a former executive at Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. That restructuring came as Walmart continues to ramp up its efforts to better compete with Amazon and as it uses more technology for previously manual tasks like tracking which products aren't available on store shelves.

Mr. Johnson reported to Mr. Kumar for a few months under the new structure. Previously, Mr. Johnson was the company's top information-technology executive for nearly three years, overseeing about 10,000 employees and all of Walmart's IT initiatives, including cybersecurity.

Walmart on Tuesday sent a memo to employees, seen by The Wall Street Journal, that said Mr. Johnson was leaving to pursue another opportunity. His last day at Walmart is Sept. 27, the memo said.

At Yum Brands, Mr. Johnson stands to have more influence as an IT leader than he did in his diminished role at Walmart, said Gerry McNamara, senior partner at for the technology officers practice at executive-search firm Korn Ferry. "Now he gets to sit at a table with all the execs at Yum and set the strategic agenda," he said.

Mr. Johnson is joining Louisville, Ky.-based Yum following other changes in the company's executive leadership team. In August, Yum said Chief Operating Officer David Gibbs would become its next chief executive in January. Mr. Gibbs has said that he intends to invest in technology to improve the ease of ordering delivery from Yum's roughly 48,000 restaurants world-wide. Last year, Yum bought a 3% stake in food-delivery service Grubhub Inc. for $200 million to buttress its delivery capabilities in the U.S.

Fast-food restaurants including Yum face challenges involving how to use data to better engage with customers and offer them personalized marketing that could lead to more revenue, said Trevor Boomstra, director in the restaurant, hospitality and leisure practice at consulting firm AlixPartners.

Retail has been ahead of food services in collecting data and mining it for competitive advantage, largely because customer loyalty programs have been in place at retailers for about 30 years, Mr. Boomstra said.

Yum's Pizza Hut chain has steep competition from Domino's Pizza Inc., a tech leader in the industry. Domino's, which pioneered ordering pizza online in 2007, recently began testing self-driving vehicles and artificial-intelligence-enabled cameras that perform quality audits on pizzas. It also lets customers order pizzas on various platforms including Slack, Twitter, Amazon Alexa and smart televisions.

Pizza Hut's mobile app for online ordering launched in 2009. Now the company is focusing on using technology to improve pickup and takeout, said Jill Failla, food-service analyst at market-research firm Mintel.

Meanwhile, Taco Bell is expanding its touch-screen, self-ordering kiosks. A quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds said they use restaurant kiosks so they can order more food without feeling judged, according to a Mintel survey of 2,000 adults conducted in May.

Yum reported one of its strongest quarters in years this month, beating expectations for sales and profits.

Prior to Walmart, Mr. Johnson worked at companies including General Electric Co., Boeing Co., Dell Technologies Inc. and FedEx Corp.

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 17, 2019 16:41 ET (20:41 GMT)

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