The Restaurant Leadership Conference showed that the restaurant industry is moving quickly toward a transformational future, complete with AI technologies that increase operational efficiency, deliver labor savings, and enhance the customer experience. Neither worries about the economy, nor fear of the unknown are slowing AI adoption.
I served on a panel for one session, Beyond ChatGPT: AI Technologies that are Worth the Hype, alongside Andi Huels and Susan Sly of RadiusAI and Vadim Parizher, VP of Technology at Taco Bell. We talked about breaking through the noise to identify and deploy AI technologies that support your brand promise. The audience was highly engaged, interested in new use cases for AI and curious about best practices for constructing ROI models.
Sessions throughout the conference reflected restaurant leaders’ concern about how to successfully implement AI (and other technologies) across every location in order to deliver a consistent brand experience. Technology leaders of major quick service and fast casual brands recognize the value of AI, but implementation across disparate geographies, franchise owners, and performance levels is proving to be a challenge.
Here are three tips to support the successful adoption of AI across all levels.
1. Collect insights from the field
Successful technology deployments always start with conversations. Managers and employees in the individual stores have some great insight into their biggest day-to-day challenges, customer behaviors and operational shortfalls. Take time in the planning process to collect their feedback. Understand their pain points and factor those findings into the prioritization of use cases. This is a far more effective method for selecting AI use cases to deliver on your brand promise than merely following suit with competitors.
2. Provide support
Most franchise owners/ store operators don’t claim deep expertise in emerging technology. They need corporate’s leadership to vet and select AI technologies and build use cases. Funding is another area where brands can support franchises to ensure consistency across all locations. Investments in AI will help achieve a consistent customer experience across every customer’s visit to any location, setting franchises up for long-term revenue success.
3. Introduce and train
In many cases, we see employees who are reticent to adopt AI, specifically in applications that replace human interaction. It’s important to manage the human side of deployment with training and conversations that show employees how these technologies are built to empower, not replace them. We see more eager adoption once employees understand what the technology can do for them. This communication is critically important to smooth adoption and use of AI.
It's also helpful to explore possible use cases for AI. Check out our blog to explore lots of great articles on the topic.
If you want to talk through best practices for successful deployment, please reach out to me at bbergmann@telaid.com. I’d love to share our findings with you to champion the success of your transformation.
