Just Eat shows how building on strong foundations lets you do both the glamorous innovation work and the high-value automation work, unlocking the real promise of AI on multiple fronts at once.

By picking targeted areas and scaling successes to a shared platform, Just Eat focused on ensuring key systems were available for integration with all flavours of AI agents and workflows. From Customer Service to partner-side processes, and internal tooling that lets colleagues build what they need on the shared platform, available to all roles and functions. By empowering users from finance, legal and other areas to build, they no longer have to wait at the end of an engineering backlog.

That groundwork is what made a consumer voice assistant, to help customers in the discovery phase, a reasonable next step. James Osborn, Senior Director of AI & Data at Just Eat, traces the line from back-office automation to voice ordering running across European markets, explaining what each layer had to be capable of before the next one was attempted. He closes on what the internal work gave Just Eat Takeaway that a standalone voice project would not: employees who already knew how to build with these tools.

Key takeaways

• Which internal and partner-side automation needs to be working before a customer-facing agent is realistic
• How a shared AI platform lets non-engineering teams solve problems engineers were never going to reach
• What Just Eat gained by sequencing capability instead of starting with the visible thing