This week on The Digital Restaurant, I’m joined by a new co-host — Alex, an AI avatar — as we break down five headlines showing how delivery, automation, and AI are shaping the next wave of restaurant operations:
01:10 – Olive Garden’s off-premise engine is humming
Uber Direct integration, buy-one-take-one offers, and nearly 7% same-store sales growth from delivery alone
05:25 – Yum China rolls out Q Smartt
A voice-activated wearable assistant for managers, designed to surface operational insights in real time
11:05 – GPT failed at report building
QSR’s Mary Pillow Thompson spent a weekend trying to automate daily ops. The issue wasn’t the model—it was the lack of orchestration
13:30 – DoorDash acquires Symbiosis for $175M
A strategic bet on local commerce advertising, with closed-loop attribution from ad to order
17:45 – Coco raises $80M to scale delivery bots
Semi-autonomous, human-guided, and aiming for 10,000 units deployed by 2026
Quote of the week:
“Coco isn’t replacing humans — they’re redeploying them smarter.”
Full episode: https://thedigitalrestaurant.buzzsprout.com
#restauranttech #AI #offpremise #DoorDash #OliveGarden #CocoRobotics #YumChina #InvisibleTechnologies
Shoutouts:
Zach Rash, Joey Simons, Sam Altman, Ryan Graves, Mary Pillow Thompson, Alex (AI co-host)
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