Guthrie Cooper (Senior Group Product Manager, AI & Robotics) and Nidhi Sharma (Global Head of Engineering AI & Incubation) from Just Eat Takeaway.com join the MLOps.community to pull back the curtain on how one of Europe's largest food delivery platforms is running an internal innovation engine. From autonomous delivery robots to agentic AI voice assistants, they share what it actually takes to build like a startup inside a 40,000-person company.
Inside Just Eat's AI Lab: Voice Agents & Agentic Commerce // MLOps Podcast #377 with Just Eat Takeaway.com's Guthrie Cooper (Senior Group Product Manager, AI & Robotics) and Nidhi Sharma (Global Head of Engineering AI & Incubation)
🤖 Delivery Robots — How JET partnered with RIVR and DELIVERS.AI to deploy physical AI ground robots in Zurich, Milton Keynes, and Bristol, and what the first pilots taught the team
🧠 AI Incubation at Scale — How Nidhi's team built a dedicated incubation unit to fast-track AI experiments without the red tape of a large enterprise
🎙️ AI Voice Assistant — The story behind JET's new voice-first food ordering experience, and the ML challenges of building a conversational concierge at scale
🦾 Physical AI vs. Software AI — Why deploying wheeled-legged robots in real cities is fundamentally different from shipping a model update, and the MLOps implications
🚀 Corporate Innovation Playbook — The frameworks Guthrie and Nidhi use to move from idea to pilot in weeks, not quarters, inside a large org
📦 Innovation as a Platform — How JET is thinking about turning its delivery infrastructure and AI capabilities into a reusable platform for new business lines
🔗 Startup Partnerships — What makes a good external innovation partner (vs. building in-house), and how JET evaluates robotics and AI startups for pilots
⚡ Agentic AI & Accessibility — How agentic AI is being used to make food ordering genuinely accessible for blind and low-vision users
Whether you're an ML engineer at a large company trying to get AI into production, a product leader navigating corporate innovation, or a startup founder looking to partner with a platform player — this conversation is packed with practical lessons.
🔗 Links & Resources:
Just Eat Takeaway.com: https://www.justeattakeaway.com
RIVR (physical AI delivery robots): https://www.rivr.ai
DELIVERS.AI (UK delivery robots): https://www.delivers.ai
Prosus (JET parent company): https://www.prosus.com
MLOps.community: https://mlops.community
⏱️ Timestamps
[00:00] AI Innovation Incubator Strategy
[03:16] Everyday Convenience Expansion
[07:03] Context Ownership in Ecosystems
[17:35] LLM Integration and Discovery
[24:02] Whoop Notifications Grievances
[33:01] Expanding Beyond Food
[48:20] Innovation Lab Failures
[51:22] Rory Sutherland's Alchemy
[1:03:23] Latency and Conversational Design
[1:13:42] Drone Delivery Efficiency
[1:18:06] Wrap up
#AgenticCommerce #VoiceAI #DroneDelivery
