AI has come for Domino’s pizza tracker, and we’re not mad about it

While companies cram artificial intelligence features you never asked for into their apps, Domino’s seems to have found a valid use case for the technology: more accurate tracking of when your pizza will be ready.

When Domino’s launched its pizza tracker in 2008, it was a marvel of UX. The tracker gave customers a lens into when their pizza would be ready through a simple interface that lit up as the pizza progressed from ordered to baked to delivered. The tool turned Domino’s into a tech company, and inspired industries (and governments) to adopt the same UX for their own needs.

Now, Domino’s made the biggest update to its pizza tracker in years. The new tracker features a simplified progress bar that shows just four stages of pizza creation. The new design was rolled out to all platforms, and there’s also new Lock Screen widgets for iOS that bring the pizza chain’s most famous tech feature to the Liquid Glass age. Behind it all is an AI model that the company says will give users the most accurate time estimates.

Domino’s improved tracker uses a proprietary operating system it calls “DomOS” to better estimate orders through machine learning models that track real-time inputs, like what’s being ordered, how busy a store is at the time, how orders tend to cluster (like during a big sports game or commercial break), and what’s happening on the delivery side.

“AI helps by looking at these signals together instead of isolation,” Domino’s vice president of global digital marketing Mark Messing tells Fast Company. “It learns from patterns we’ve seen before and continuously adjusts in real time as conditions change.”

The company is promising more precise times for when pizzas will be ready for pickup or arrive for delivery. A rideshare-style interface shows a delivery driver as a car icon on a map like Uber that users can track in real time.

For iOS users, the app’s Lock Screen widgets appear as Domino’s Tracker progress bar with an estimated delivery time. When an order is out for delivery, the progress bar becomes a car to show your pizza is mobile and delivery is imminent. The redesign was done by Dominio’s digital experience team in partsnership with their agency WorkInProgress.

Domino domination

Domino’s is the leading pizza chain nationally in the U.S. at a time when pizza sales are struggling. Pizza Hut’s parent company is considering a sale and announced the closure of 250 stores in February. Meanwhile Domino’s chief financial officer Sandeep Reddy said on the company’s last earnings call that Domino’s retail sales had grown 5.5% thanks to same-store sales, a promotion, and new specialty pizza flavors.

Domino’s refreshed its brand last year with a new font, brightened color palette, and redesigned pizza boxes that play off the domino theme with dots. It also introduced what it calls a “cravemark,” or its tagline “mmm” expressed audibly through a jingle recorded by Shaboozey.

Like its overhauled visual brand, the revamped pizza tracker shows that Domino’s is doubling down on what it’s best known for. Since the company introduced its tracker in 2008, it has tracked more than 2.5 billion orders.

Domino’s original tracker was the first web-based pizza tracker in the industry, and it had a futuristic, skeuomorphic style with segments for each stage that lit up red or blue as a consumer’s order went from prep to delivery. The company gave users the options to customize their trackers in 2010 with six themes that they could use to reskin the progress bar. The company added GPS delivery tracking to the feature in 2019.

The new tracker reduces the number of stages to just four—named “Placed,” “Make,” Deliver,” and “MMM”—while old names for stages like “Bake” and “Quality Check” are now gone. While the main progress bar is simplified, inside the app, there’s more specific information, like what time their order was placed in the oven and what time a delivery driver left the store.

“The goal was flexibility without complexity,” Messing says.

It’s an update that helps Dominos make the most of AI to be more dependable for customers. And at a time when delivery pizza sales are under pressure, that gives the company an edge with one of its best-ever marketing tools.