Leon Davoyan, the chief technology officer for Dave’s Hot Chicken, has ramped up the application of artificial intelligence across the restaurant chain’s operations, including the drive-thru, mobile ordering, rover delivery, and robotic arms that whip up french fries.
But he is cautious not to lose the human touch of hospitality. That AI-enabled drive-thru—a trendy application of AI that historically hasn’t had the smoothest deployment for larger chains including McDonald’s and Taco Bell—isn’t intended to replace workers. “Our strategy is to allow the human to do more with the robot assistant,” says Davoyan.
All that said, successful deployments of AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies could give Dave’s Hot Chicken an edge in the fast-growing and highly competitive chicken restaurant category that includes incumbent brands like Chick-fil-A and Popeyes and fast-growing concepts like Raising Cane’s, Hangry Joe’s Hot Chicken & Wings, and Dave’s. Quick-service and fast-casual chicken restaurants expanded their domestic unit count by 4.7% in 2024 from the prior year, along with a sales leap of nearly 10%, according to market research Datassential.
Adding more AI-enabled functionality to Dave’s Hot Chicken’s ordering systems has been a core priority for Davoyan over the past year and a half and will continue to be an area of focus in 2026. He has launched AI drive-thru ordering and hopes that the learnings from this application can be used to train large language models that could be tapped for similar functionality in the company’s mobile app.
Dave’s Hot Chicken, which was acquired by private equity firm Roark Capital in a deal valued at around $1 billion earlier this year, is also working with several vendors to develop more precise predictions for when food will be ready. The times are then displayed on a digital order board within the store. When stores are busy, orders can take up to 45 minutes to be ready. Davoyan says he wants the predictive technology to get inside two minutes of accuracy.
At the test stores where these systems have been deployed, Davoyan says the chain is adding seven to eight more transactions per week above locations that don’t have this feature. “The hypothesis is becoming true that if you serve up order-ready times more accurately, then the orders will come,” he adds.
Dave’s Hot Chicken has also implemented some text-based updates for mobile orders, and in the future, Davoyan says he wants to add in-app order status updates similar to what DoorDash and Uber Eats offers.
At the front counter of the restaurant, Dave’s Hot Chicken has deployed kiosks, which are positioned to be slightly tilted so the cashier can monitor ordering progress and step in if there are any issues. The company says 23% of in-restaurant orders are booked by the kiosks today, and they increase the check amount by an average of 5.9%. Davoyan says this revenue generation results in a return on investment that’s under a year.
“We don’t remove the human element,” says Davoyan. “We have yet to reduce head count with all the things that we’re testing.”
Davoyan has also rolled out Microsoft Copilot across the corporate office, though he’s not completely sold on the maturity of the technology. “I think there are other solutions that we should explore,” he says.
Other internal applications of AI include customer service, where favorable restaurant reviews get an AI-written response that’s automatically published online, while the reviews with more critical feedback are reviewed and edited by a customer service agent before the AI drafted response is approved.
AI is also being used for drone and rover deliveries and will be incorporated in the company’s two test robotic arms at the fry station. “We’re going to use AI to predict how many fries we’re going to need,” says Davoyan, who wants these robots to produce a constant flow of fresh fries that doesn’t hurt food quality.
He says that the autonomous french fry functionality is seeing a return on investment, but not yet below the two-year threshold that Dave’s Hot Chicken looks for when spending on tech. “Robots are very expensive,” says Davoyan. “It creates a barrier of entry for restaurants.”
Dave’s Hot Chicken also managed to completely avoid the Amazon Web Services cloud outage that ensnared tech firms, banks, and airlines in October. The company’s point of sale system relies on the vendor Qu, which has installed a physical device that runs cloud locally in every store. “We made all of our customers deploy the edge device,” says Amir Hudda, Qu’s CEO, whose other clients include Blaze Pizza and Jack in the Box. None of those restaurants were impacted by the AWS shutdown.
Davoyan says Infrastructure is easy to take for granted because of the general reliability that tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft offer their customers. But big outages have become more commonplace, including at Cloudflare last month and Microsoft Azure in October. And because restaurants operate on extremely thin margins, they cannot afford lost sales when POS systems are down and orders need to be halted or processed by hand.
“We knew that the day would come where there would be some level of meltdown and because we have high volume locations, we made that a priority,” says Davoyan. “You should always have a backup plan.”
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
OpenAI issues "Code Red" as Google mounts challenge. The Wall Street Journal reports on a company memo issued this week by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that declared a "code red" to focus efforts on bolstering ChatGPT, including increasing its speed and reliability, and put less effort on other products. This comes less than a month after Google's newest model, Gemini 3, won rave reviews for its capabilities in reasoning, coding, and some tasks performed by AI chatbots. In other news on OpenAI, the company on Monday announced it would take an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, a deal that would enable OpenAI to embed more AI tools in accounting and IT services companies. Separately, the AI startup also struck a deal with Accenture, giving ChatGPT Enterprise access to tens of thousands of the consulting giant’s employees.
Nvidia makes yet another AI investment. The AI chipmaker announced it bought a $2 billion stake in Synopsys, part of an expanded partnership between the pair as they plan to integrate Nvidia’s AI capabilities with Synopsys’ engineering solutions targeted to research and development teams across a number of sectors including aerospace and automotive. Nvidia has been on an AI investment splurge, recently pouring $100 billion into OpenAI, $15 billion alongside Microsoft in Anthropic, and $5 billion in Intel.
DeepSeek debuts new AI models that rival OpenAI, Google. China-based AI startup DeepSeek debuted two new versions of an experimental AI model that it claims match some od the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini-3 Pro. Bloomberg reports that the new AI models have fresh capabilities to help combine reasoning and execute certain actions autonomously. Venturebeat reports that the claim of parity with DeepSeek’s American rivals is based on testing across mathematics, coding, and reasoning tasks. There’s been a steady drumbeat of new AI model rollouts over the past couple of weeks, including from Anthropic, Google, and Runway—the latter on Monday unveiled a new video model it says is good at understanding physics, human motion, camera movements, and cause and effect.
HP cutting jobs as it contends with higher chips costs. The PC maker announced it would cut 4,000 to 6,000 employees through fiscal 2028 as it plans to apply more usage of AI tools to areas like product development, customer support, and sales and marketing, CEO Enrique Lores told Bloomberg. The company has recently benefited from increased demand for new AI PCs but is also dealing with higher memory chips prices, which is cutting into profits. Layoffs have also recently been announced at Apple, which cut some sales jobs, and at Verizon, with the telecommunications giant trimming 13,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce. The cuts across major tech giants comes as a recent KPMG survey showed that 52% of U.S. workers fear AI will replace their jobs, a fear that’s nearly doubled from last year.
Campbell’s fires IT exec after accusations of racist remarks caught on audio. Campbell’s last week disclosed that Martin Bally, a VP of IT, was no longer with the food giant after the company reviewed an audio recording in which the executive allegedly said the company’s products were “highly processed food” for “poor people.” The audiotape surfaced as part of an ongoing lawsuit with a former employee who alleged Bally had made racist remarks about Indian workers. Bally had worked at Campbell’s for nearly four years and previously served in technology leadership roles at automotive manufacturer Stellantis and automotive products supplier American Axle & Manufacturing.
ADOPTION CURVE
Real estate industry embraces AI but few are fully pleased with their AI pilots. The number of corporate real estate property managers running AI pilots has soared from 5% in 2023 to 92% by July of this year and these property occupiers are pursuing an average of five pilot projects simultaneously across a broad swatch of use cases ranging from documentation to energy management to design and construction planning, according to a survey of over 1,000 senior CRE decision-makers conducted by commercial real estate and investment management company JLL.
“That is really surprising, because the commercial real estate industry is usually considered to be a laggard in terms of adopting technology,” says Yao Morin, CTO at JLL, in an interview with Fortune.
Still, Morin notes that the survey found that only 5% of CRE leaders report they have achieved “most program goals” with their AI pilots. She said some pain points that JLL has observed include the messiness of organizing real estate data, which relies on a lot of unstructured data from physical operations, and accurately measuring how much efficiency can actually be derived from AI tools.
Courtesy of JLL Research
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
- Operation Smile is seeking a CIO, based in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Posted salary range: $145K-$165K/year.
- Veeam Software is seeking a field CTO for the Americas, a remote-based role. Posted salary range: $226.2K-$323.1K/year.
- Waterford Research Institute is seeking a CTO, a remote-based role. Posted salary range: $265K-$290K/year.
- The University of Vermont is seeking a deputy CTO, based in Jericho, Vermont. Posted salary range: $110K-$150K/year.
Hired:
- Expedia Group appointed Xavier Amatriain as its first chief AI and data officer, overseeing the long-term vision for AI and machine learning for the travel technology company. Amatriain joins Expedia from Google, where he most recently served as VP of AI and compute enablement. He also previously held senior positions at LinkedIn and Netflix and has mentored talent who went on to found Perplexity and Scale AI.
- AmeriLife appointed Sulabh Srivastava as CIO, reporting to Tim Calvert, who serves as chief operating officer. Prior to joining the life and health insurance provider, Srivastava most recently served as global CIO at insurance company Acrisure. He also previously served as CTO at Michigan-based Sparrow Health System and as a VP of IT for Indiana University Health.
- Gecko Robotics has promoted Ed Bryner to the role of CTO, elevating a founding engineer to the C-suite after he joined the AI robotics company as a founding engineer in 2016.
- Dualboot Partners promoted Billy Boozer to the role of CTO, less than five months after he joined the software development company as VP of AI strategy and product innovation. Previously, Boozer has served as a founder of several tech startups, including Letr, MerchantMob, and Boo Digital. He also previously held the CTO role at payments provider Secure Bancard.
- ZeroFox named Shon Myatt as CTO of the cybersecurity company. Myatt joins from Babel Street, which offers risk intelligence services to law enforcement agencies and the private sector, where he served as president and CTO after co-founding the company in 2009.
- Duck Creek Technologies appointed Rajesh Raheja as CTO to oversee the engineering organization and global tech strategy as the company advances new AI capabilities for the insurance industry. Raheja joins the software maker from cloud-software company HPE, where he served as SVP of the private cloud and AI software business. He also previously served as chief engineering officer at software provider Boomi.
