March 6, 2025 • 26 mins
In this eye-opening episode of The Restaurant Report, Abhinav Kapur, founder and CEO of Bikky, reveals how AI and data analytics are reshaping the restaurant industry. From voice ordering systems to customer retention strategies, Kapur shares insights gained from analyzing 350 million guest profiles across major brands like Bojangles and Dave's Hot Chicken. Learn why 80% of guests never return after their first visit, how the remaining 20% drive up to 75% of revenue, and why automation concepts like Sweetgreen's Infinite Kitchen are delivering dramatically improved profit margins. Whether you're running a QSR, fast casual, or traditional restaurant, this conversation offers practical guidance on using data to thrive in today's challenging market.
~This episode is sponsored by: Gusto → https://gusto.pxf.io/PBN
#1 rated HR platform for payroll, benefits, and more
With Gusto’s easy-to-use platform, you can empower your people and push your business forward. See why over 400,000 businesses choose Gusto.
#RestaurantTech #AIinHospitality #CustomerRetention
Get Your Podcast Now! Are you a hospitality or restaurant industry leader looking to amplify your voice and establish yourself as a thought leader? Look no further than SavorFM, the premier podcast platform designed exclusively for hospitality visionaries like you. Take the next step in your industry leadership journey – visit https://www.savor.fm/
Capital & Advisory: Are you a fast-casual restaurant startup or a technology innovator in the food service industry? Don't miss out on the opportunity to tap into decades of expertise. Reach out to Savor Capital & Advisory now to explore how their seasoned professionals can propel your business forward. Discover if you're eligible to leverage our unparalleled knowledge in food service branding and technology and take your venture to new heights.
Don't wait – amplify your voice or supercharge your startup's growth today with Savor's ecosystem of industry-leading platforms and advisory services. Visit https://www.savor.fm/capital-advisory
~This episode is sponsored by: Gusto → https://gusto.pxf.io/PBN
#1 rated HR platform for payroll, benefits, and more
With Gusto’s easy-to-use platform, you can empower your people and push your business forward. See why over 400,000 businesses choose Gusto.
#RestaurantTech #AIinHospitality #CustomerRetention
Get Your Podcast Now! Are you a hospitality or restaurant industry leader looking to amplify your voice and establish yourself as a thought leader? Look no further than SavorFM, the premier podcast platform designed exclusively for hospitality visionaries like you. Take the next step in your industry leadership journey – visit https://www.savor.fm/
Capital & Advisory: Are you a fast-casual restaurant startup or a technology innovator in the food service industry? Don't miss out on the opportunity to tap into decades of expertise. Reach out to Savor Capital & Advisory now to explore how their seasoned professionals can propel your business forward. Discover if you're eligible to leverage our unparalleled knowledge in food service branding and technology and take your venture to new heights.
Don't wait – amplify your voice or supercharge your startup's growth today with Savor's ecosystem of industry-leading platforms and advisory services. Visit https://www.savor.fm/capital-advisory
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of the Restaurant Report. Today
we're going to be talking about AI and what it
means for the restaurant space. So it's going to be
a good one. I think you guys are going to
like it. I've got the CEO and founder of Biki,
this is a customer data platform and CDP out there,
and his name is Abanov Kapor, and we're going to
be talking about the potential of where the restaurant industry
(00:23):
could go in terms of AI. You guys don't want
to miss this one. Stick around and.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
We will be right back.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This episode is brought to you in part by Gusto,
the number one rated HR platform for payroll, benefits and more.
With Gusto's easy to use platform, you can empower your
people and push your business forward. Over four hundred thousand
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Check it all out. Just go over to Gusto dot
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you there. All right, we're back here and we're going
to dive into AI and the use case. As I said,
we're gonna have Abanov come on today and talk a
little bit more about it. Biki is one of those
companies that powers database decisions for brands like Bojangles, Mod Pizza,
(02:30):
Dave's Hot Chicken, Plia Bowls, and also Eggs Upgrill. So
he's already in a lot of brands, and the question
is is how does Ai truly fit. So let's just
get him into the show and we'll kind of bring
him in and see what Abanava is doing. Abanov, how
are you?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I said, great for you? Yeah, you got it? Yeah?
How are you give me.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
A quick rundown on Beki? What do you guys?
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Do?
Speaker 1 (02:52):
You talked about customer data platform, but what does that
mean to a brand?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So I started the business seven and a half years ago.
My mother also restaurant operator, and she was literally writing
down phone numbers off of delivery tablets and emailing customers
who made reservations on open table and just got obsessed
with this idea that you know, she's in the business
of hospitality and really doesn't know anything about the person
behind the transaction, you know, in New York City or
something like Restaurant Week, and she would do a restaurant
(03:17):
week menu, and she would say, are new people actually
coming in on the restaurant week menu? Am I taking
an existing guest and just pulling their visit forward and
giving them, you know, a cheaper prefix option. Am I
driving more frequency as a result of this restaurant week menu?
And again she had all these sort of like breadcrumbs
of data around her business, but no real way to
answer some of these critical questions. And so I got
(03:38):
obsessed with this idea of you know, how do we
basically pull together all of a restaurant's data across point
of sale payments, online ordering, reservations, loyalty Wi Fi and
really map the entire customer journey for them. And then
when they pull a lever in their business, whether it's
a marketing promotion or a new menu item, instead of
looking at you know, top line sales, which is really
(03:59):
the only real indicator most brands have to understand the
success of what's happening in how do we give them
the customer level data, the impact on traffic, on frequency,
on churn to really know what decisions are successful and
how successful are they. And so today we work with
as you mentioned.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Around Yeah, quite a few brands across the US now, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
So thousands of locations. Dave sat Chicken. How what's the
oldest brand that you guys have deployed on.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
EXCEP Grill is definitely our our you know, the og
as I would say they took a leap of faith
on us in the early days, and uh, you know
it was for them, it was a very simple initial
use case, which was like, we just want to personalize
our local store marketing. Yeah, and we need a way
to use data to use that, and then we need
(04:47):
a way to measure how successful those efforts are. And
it's really it's expanded from there to incorporate the menu operations,
all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Let's talk about the the idea of AI usage. I mean,
it's been more and more of a topic here on
our network as we cover it on across a lot
of the podcasts. But when you look at the real
use case for the restaurant industry, many people will point
to back a house. Possibly we could see it in
the operational side in terms of equipment AI integration to
(05:16):
where you you know, there's just less of the everyday
functionality of someone running an additional machine or having another
body back there that maybe AI could be the potential
holy grail of back of house. What is your opinion.
Do you think we're going to see it more on
back of house or do you think we're going to
see more customer facing stuff?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I think, honestly, I think the short answer is we'll
probably see it everywhere over time.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
I would caution anybody from thinking.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
That there are really good, you know, game changing use
cases for AI in the restaurant industry, and I would
apply that actually to I mean, I think about it
this way right like I don't. I'm thinking about how
I use AI in my life as a founder and CEO,
and I'm only just still feel like I'm scratching the
surface of what it's capability for me in my work,
(06:05):
let alone someone who is, you know, trying to execute
perfectly across order prep, across hiring and labor management, across
inventory management, across P and L management. And so I
think again, this is the arc of AI is long,
and adoption and value will take time to create. That
being said, you know, there are some options to take
(06:27):
some of the low hanging fruit, the more manual work
that operators are doing, and automate some of those through AI. Right,
exactly what I think of is, you know, there's obviously
a very high correlation from responding to reviews on Yelp
and Google with having a higher profile, and then you
get surface more in the search results, and that leads
to higher sales and traffic, and it can be very
(06:49):
you know, when my mother in law came home from
at the end of the day, the last thing she
wants to do is flip open her computer at eleven
thirty at night and say, let me respond to all
my Google reviews. But that being said, yeah, you could
use AI, and maybe it doesn't remove the personal touch,
but you could start to use AI to at least
engage guests who leave good reviews yeah, or flag the
(07:10):
ones that are potentially negative reviews that need your time
as an operator, need some of your valuable time to
investigate and understand.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
What I've talked to.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I've talked to a lot of operators that have kind
of said, hey, listen, I'm starting to use it in
workflow management, whether it's hiring, much like to your point
customer service to a certain level, being able to do
more and easier, I should say, functional workflow projects that
they might be like a training manual, or maybe they're
doing something, you know, in a market research around real
(07:41):
estate all that kind of those seem to be much
more clerical and more functional tools and tasks for a
restaurant operator. But once you get inside the operations, then
that's where it gets to be a question for me
is just how quickly is it going to come and
become a thing I hear? And I've talked to a
lot of different technology companies that are starting to move
(08:03):
in this space. I had one company on not too
long ago that was talking about agentic AI and what
they had done is creating AI agents to kind of
create these mundane task scenarios that might play out in
just through a food order. This is one of the
early stage companies that we've talked with, and this could
(08:23):
be a factor going forward, especially if we see a
new interface. Do you think there is a possibility that
because AI is moving so quickly on the consumer front,
that maybe we see some AI front ends coming at
restaurants in unique ways through like ordering, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Yeah, I think voice is the big thing that obviously
a lot of people are exploring, you know, and I
won't it's still amazing to me that even within our
guest base that you have high single digit percentages of
orders for some brands right right being calling being phone orders,
And I think there's a very there are some really
(09:01):
good founders out there that are experimenting with ways to
basically automate.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
That entire process.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
I mean using a voice, a natural human sounding voice,
to answer the phone, take the order, send place the order, PULD,
send a payment link, like I have a friend of
mine who's working on this right now, and it is
pretty minimally like as a user, you don't necessarily know
you're talking to an AI. And I think that'll get
(09:27):
even better over time, meaning it'll be harder to kind
of perceive are you talking to a.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Human our emissions?
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, from an experience standpoint, Like my whole philosophy with
restaurants is, you know, if you look at sort of
what happened with retail a decade ago, you had this
hollowing out of the middle where you had, you know,
the department stores like Macy's, JC Penny, the things that
tried to be everyone for everything, for everyone, they sort
of kind of lost away. But if you look at
(09:56):
sort of where the spectrum went, people either anchored on
convenience or experience, and I think the same thing is
going to happen to the restaurant industry, for better or worse.
And so things like voice ordering and AI and voice
AI for ordering leans into a convenience aspect where you
are someone who is trying to serve I think in
(10:17):
my mother in law again, you are someone who's trying
to serve the guest in store, someone who's actually sitting
down and spending their hard earned dollars and wants that
more experiential environment. The last thing you want to do
is rip away from the guest experience and answer phone
and take a phone order, which is what again my
mother in law would do. And so, you know, taking
some of this low hanging fruit and enabling operators to
(10:38):
serve more guests more frictionlessly through technology, I think is
certainly a powerful trend that will continue and enhances the
overall guest experience.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, I wonder if we're going to see that point
where the customer's leverage of AI tools themselves becomes a superpower.
You know, if you think about find me the best reservation,
find me the restaurants that do this, this or that,
especially on travel planning. I know we've started to do
that within our own family. I've been surprised at how
(11:12):
well it does going into a city. I'm traveling to
DC here soon, and I gave it a whole litany
of things to do. And this was perplexity, I think,
and it came back with some fairly competent answers that
I was like, that's not bad. I mean, I might
do a little bit better on this topic. But do
you think that consumers are now going to kind of
(11:34):
have that one up on where the industry is going? Well?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
I think so, But you know, I think consumers are
for better or worse, you know, because of how I
never like when people say restaurant operators are slow to
adopt technology because they don't think technology can work for them.
I don't think that's true. I think the business is
so demanding that is genuinely hard to take time out
of your day to be like, what's the latest tech
(12:00):
trend and how can I adopt it for my business? Right,
you're just working in the business so much that it's
hard to work on the business, and so a lot
of the tech trends that happen in this industry for
better or worse are consumer are changes on the consumer
side that drag the restaurant industry along with them. Marketplaces
are a great example of this. Now to your question
(12:20):
specifically around will consumers sort of be on the front
end of AI and will that bring restaurants along.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I saw a post.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I saw the CEO of par which is a big
publicly traded company in our industry. He tweeted or he
wrote something on LinkedIn interest recently which was what happens
to the third party delivery platforms in a role in
the world of agentic and voice AI where you can
say to an AI, go do this, or order me
a burger from shakeshak ye, you know, and it's all
(12:48):
through your voice, and it's like, okay, what do you want? Okay,
do you want? What are the modifiers that you want?
Do you want to and it up sells you through
the power of your voice. Where does that order actually
get placed? Does it through a phone call to that restaurant,
does it happen on the restaurant's direct online ordering platform,
or does it happen through the third party delivery platform?
And I think that is a very interesting, like a
(13:09):
nuanced case where we aren't even grappling with the with
the ramifications of that type of behavior. I think we're still,
you know the world of ais progressing quickly, so we're
probably at least twelve months away from something like that happening.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
It's actually happening now. We just we saw one of
the tests that was done at a project build not
too long ago on blockchain, and this was a company
that was doing a gentic ai and they were using
basically using blockchain to track the payment mechanism that converted
it into US dollars, but they were using some webbooks
(13:43):
directly with Postmates and uber eats to be able to
execute on it. Sure, on the restaurant side, it goes
back to that kind of that tablet farm that used
to exist in third party delivery where you had a
tablet from everyone. I wonder if that will be the
factor going forward, But that has been done with agentic ai.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
The question will be is when does a restaurant build
their own agent and that is able to handle it
and handle whether it's up selling, you know, dynamic pricing,
all sorts of things that could play into this. Do
you think that will be coming first?
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I think that's tough for you know, and like our
sort of philosophy at BICKI here from a from a
customer data and analytics standpoint is, you know, and we
work with brands that are up to one thousand units.
And the way we like to frame it is always
like you're in the business of ordering, of making food, and.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Executing on the guest experience.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
Like that is your at the end of the day
when you think about, like source what drives retention in
a restaurant, Like, I'll just give you some high level stats,
like typically we have about three hundred and fifty guest profiles,
three hundred and fifty million guest profiles in our system.
And the thing that we found is that on average,
eighty percent of guests never come back after the first visit,
and the twenty percent that do come back can drive
anywhere from fifty to seventy five percent of a brand's revenue. Yeah,
(15:00):
and so making the food, executing on the food, and
executing on that experience is the highest probability thing that
you can do as a restaurant to increase frequency, drive retention,
and drive long term repeatable sales. Now Nowhere in that
equation does building technology factor in for better or worse.
And so I think to your question, maybe the biggest,
(15:22):
the top five, the top ten brands, McDonald's, Domino's, you know,
Chick fil A. They have engineering teams, they are thinking
about the cutting edge of leveraging AI and data and
machine learning. Maybe they will invest in building out some
of these capabilities. But I would say the other ninety
nine point nine percent of brands, it's hard enough doing
that number one priority well consistently enough over time that
(15:46):
again I think, you know, entrepreneurs, people who innovate in
the space will come in and provide some of that
value and make it easier for restaurants to use those
tools and use that technology to grow their businesses.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
What do you Okay, So let's jump over to adoption barriers,
because this could happen on two fronts. One front, of course,
is adoption in the restaurant space, which you, as a
tech company, has got to You've got a chance to
experience that very slow moving in terms of the restaurant
industry attaching to technology and being able to leverage it.
(16:18):
That's number one. Then you have the adoption cycle of
the consumer, which seems to be much faster. I mean,
we saw with social media. We've seen it with mobile
that all of that was kind of the restaurant industry
was kind of pulled through by the consumer. Do you
feel like that's going to be the case with a
lot of the AI tools.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
So yeah, I don't see a reason that could change.
I mean, the thing that the big exception, the big
caveat here and this will probably make me eat my words,
but you never know when someone's gonna when someone is
going to solve the operational toil for lack of our term,
involved in running the business in a day to day basis.
(16:57):
So the example that comes to mind is is if
you have an operator that can just say, hey, like
we're out of we're out of onions, like eighty six
everything with onions from my instore menu, my and my
delivery menu. Right Like, of course we will get to that.
I don't know what the timeline is, but we will
get to that point. And that's when you sort of
(17:19):
have the restaurant industry themselves trying to adopt some of
these technologies. But that being said, that always happened. Second,
the consumer. The consumer is the primary driver of what
sort of like brings the restaurant the restaurant business along
from a technology standpoint, like, even think about it with
my business, right, Like I started the business seven and
(17:40):
a half years ago, back in twenty seventeen, no one
cared about data for restaurants like I was out there.
Even my mother in law was like, this seems like
a great platform. I can't use it. Right. But then
when the pandemic happened and every consumer was like, I
still want to order food out, I don't want to
cook all the time. Then my phone started blowing up
and people were saying, hey, you talked to us about
(18:00):
data for the last two and a half years.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
I never see my guess anymore. Please help me figure
out who these guests are and how I can understand
them and serve them better.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Right.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
And so it was consumer switching their behavior and the
adoption of digital tools that force the restaurants to sort
of modernize their tech stacks for lack of a better term.
And I think that is the wave that we are
still riding today. And so I think there will be
breakthrough moment in AI from an ordering standpoint, probably that again,
(18:30):
you know, kicks off this next cycle for AI for operations,
AI for supply chain, AI for finance, AI for analysis,
which is some of the stuff that work.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
So there has been some discussion out there around some
of the vcs that are saying, hey, you know, with
AI tools, it's very possible that we could see you know,
the first handful of billion dollar businesses that are solo entrepreneurs,
you know. And if you translate that into a restaurant
(19:00):
and say, hmmm, what about a restaurant that could operate
at you know, maybe a five million dollar clip at
UV with half or one third of the staff. Do
you think that is a potential in the future of
where this goes.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
It's tough.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
I mean, I think it's I think it's it's good
to sort of speculate on a software side, But like restaurants,
are these are still still businesses you know manual Yeah, yeah,
these are still real businesses now. I think if the
question is will there be efficiencies, absolutely I think so.
But at the end of the day, like if you
look at five million dollar AUV at a twenty dollars
(19:40):
average check, my mental math is not good, but that's
a lot of transactions on a per score basis. That's
a lot of meals that you are serving to the
got someone's got to make them, Someone's still going to
make them, someone's still got a problem, someone still well.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
It depends on automation. I mean, Chipotle's done a fairly
good job on on creating some of the robot lines,
and it's very early stage. The couple of companies that
have already kind of gone down that direction where we
could see more, you know, assembly line style restaurants. Now,
granted you lose the hospitality model there with that for
the most part depends on how it's done. But do
(20:14):
you think it will have an impact on the design
of restaurants, because if you do get into robotic lines
and things of that nature, they're going to look different.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
They will, absolutely, I think. I mean, I think you're
seeing it with sneakering.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Right now and they're infinite cares exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Yeah, that is they are, and you know they can serve.
I forget what the numbers are, but from a store
level margin standpoint, I think their traditional stores are eighteen
percent in the infinite kitchens are twenty five percent.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Wow, the store level margins like seven.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Hundred baits of that is huge, huge, huge dollars that
are going to the bottom line, and that's why it's
half of all new bills now moving forward, and I
think eventually be one hundred percent of volume the builds
moving forward. So I think I think you're seeing that
where the restaurants will look different because there are labor benefits,
there are through put benefits, which is what really dry
like that nomination is what can help them hopefully become
(21:03):
a more profitable entity over the long term.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
But I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
I think it will change design in ways that we
aren't even speculating. Like you look at the pandemic, like
the dining seventy percent of the business off premise.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Most of it's still drive through. They're still growing.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
But almost every brand I can think of that we
work with in the QSR fast casual space, the only.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Saying I need a dining room.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
No one is saying a bigger dining groups. Everybody is
looking to get smaller and serve more people with through
smaller boxes.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Well and you with their party. And especially when we
see agents start to play into this in terms of
speed and throughput, and then you have enough automation, Yeah,
you're right, you could get to you know, boxes that
could do five million in rev that would be pretty significant.
And to your point on what you were talking about
with Sweet Greens, I mean that in itself when you
look at their advancement, because that's only going to get
(21:55):
better as we start to see the technology kind of
resolve itself over the next few years. All right, aban IV,
Let's get into the last couple of points I want
to hit at. One is when you look at the
space the industry right now, several sectors are growing fairly well,
and we had some surprises. Some of the surprises was Chili's.
(22:17):
Then Red Robin came in and did surprise here recently
on an earnings Is casual dining coming back?
Speaker 3 (22:24):
I don't know, you know, I think I did some
work where I was looking at the splits between the
brands we work with from QSR Fast Casual versus casual dining,
and what I found was, because everybody was saying, like
at the end of last year, right traffic is back,
(22:45):
you know, we're positive finally again September, October, November December,
that trend is going to continue early part of this year.
That is broadly held true for Fast Casual QSR. What
we're seeing in our brands is that those folks are
up load to mid single digits from a traffic standpoint,
which is incredible.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
That's where you want to be. Now.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
The thing that I can say about casual dining is
it's less negative. It was high single digit negative and
now it's mid single digit negative.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Well, I mean, you got but if you get some
wins like what Chipotle is not Chili's has done and
read Robin, I guess the question will be is can
it hold?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
You know, Kennedy's numbers hold.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
But I think they are sort of unique in that
they prove. They're the exceptions that prove that prove the
traditional restaurant playbook, which is great value, great food, great marketing.
If you hit those, it doesn't matter what. If you
hit those three things, you're going to knock it out
of the park and do a great job. I think
both of those brands have been executing on those They've
(23:45):
been executing on them in different ways, but they have
those three core elements, which is why you are seeing
their off swing from a traffic standpoint. I think, like
if I zoom ahead right like this is still a
point of debate between me and and you know, founder
friends as well as operators that we work with on
where does casual dining go from here? People still want
an experience. The problem that you see right now in
(24:06):
the short term is that casual dining is getting squeezed
by QSR and Fast Casual right right because Fast casual
is casual level menu items food for a QSR level
price essentially, and QSR it anchors more onconvenience, and so
doubt people like I can get I can get.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
The same, it's solidy for more convenience. That's what I'm
gonna go.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Yeah, and it's been this is the age old scenario
that's come around since the midnight is when Fast Casual
really started its emergencies. Where would it pull from? It
pulls from the upper level, which is usually casual dining.
So we'll see how it plays out. Twenty twenty five
is just getting started here. We're going to find out
quickly how some of these markets start to resolve. Abanav
If people want to find you, where's the best place?
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Biki dot com b i kk y dot com is
the website you can reach me directly. A'banov abhi navy
at biki dot com. One thing we did not talk about,
which I am excited for from an AI standpoint that
I'd be remiss not to mention is you know, Paul,
you and I were talking about where does this go
as a data company. It's like AI is sort of
part and parcel of our strategy for this year because
(25:13):
to what I said earlier, my mother in law and
in the beginning was like, this looks awesome. I don't
really have the time to use it everything. With what
AI will do, generally speaking, it will make insights more accessible,
to make the ability to execute and build a thriving restaurant.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Well analyzing the data itself. I mean we're using it
even in our own tools to analyze audience demographics, all
that within the podcast. I'm amazed. We used to have
a data scientist that did all that work. We still
have him, but he's doing other things now because.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Value things, I bet. Yeah, exactly, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Because AI is really kind of stepped in to do
a lot of that work. So very cool having you
on the show today. Thanks so much for stopping in.
I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Thanks for having me. It's great being here.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
You bet all right. If you guys are not tuned
in over on YouTube, make sure and drop into save
just search that on YouTube. You'll find us there. Subscribe
to the show if you're watching this, if you are
listening to this podcast, all you have to do is
leave us a star over there on whether it's Spotify
or Apple iTunes, either one of those will work great.
We'll catch you next time right here on the Restaurant
Report
Welcome back to another episode of the Restaurant Report. Today
we're going to be talking about AI and what it
means for the restaurant space. So it's going to be
a good one. I think you guys are going to
like it. I've got the CEO and founder of Biki,
this is a customer data platform and CDP out there,
and his name is Abanov Kapor, and we're going to
be talking about the potential of where the restaurant industry
(00:23):
could go in terms of AI. You guys don't want
to miss this one. Stick around and.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
We will be right back.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
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Check it all out. Just go over to Gusto dot
com use our link down below to get started. See
you there. All right, we're back here and we're going
to dive into AI and the use case. As I said,
we're gonna have Abanov come on today and talk a
little bit more about it. Biki is one of those
companies that powers database decisions for brands like Bojangles, Mod Pizza,
(02:30):
Dave's Hot Chicken, Plia Bowls, and also Eggs Upgrill. So
he's already in a lot of brands, and the question
is is how does Ai truly fit. So let's just
get him into the show and we'll kind of bring
him in and see what Abanava is doing. Abanov, how
are you?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I said, great for you? Yeah, you got it? Yeah?
How are you give me.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
A quick rundown on Beki? What do you guys?
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Do?
Speaker 1 (02:52):
You talked about customer data platform, but what does that
mean to a brand?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So I started the business seven and a half years ago.
My mother also restaurant operator, and she was literally writing
down phone numbers off of delivery tablets and emailing customers
who made reservations on open table and just got obsessed
with this idea that you know, she's in the business
of hospitality and really doesn't know anything about the person
behind the transaction, you know, in New York City or
something like Restaurant Week, and she would do a restaurant
(03:17):
week menu, and she would say, are new people actually
coming in on the restaurant week menu? Am I taking
an existing guest and just pulling their visit forward and
giving them, you know, a cheaper prefix option. Am I
driving more frequency as a result of this restaurant week menu?
And again she had all these sort of like breadcrumbs
of data around her business, but no real way to
answer some of these critical questions. And so I got
(03:38):
obsessed with this idea of you know, how do we
basically pull together all of a restaurant's data across point
of sale payments, online ordering, reservations, loyalty Wi Fi and
really map the entire customer journey for them. And then
when they pull a lever in their business, whether it's
a marketing promotion or a new menu item, instead of
looking at you know, top line sales, which is really
(03:59):
the only real indicator most brands have to understand the
success of what's happening in how do we give them
the customer level data, the impact on traffic, on frequency,
on churn to really know what decisions are successful and
how successful are they. And so today we work with
as you mentioned.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Around Yeah, quite a few brands across the US now, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
So thousands of locations. Dave sat Chicken. How what's the
oldest brand that you guys have deployed on.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
EXCEP Grill is definitely our our you know, the og
as I would say they took a leap of faith
on us in the early days, and uh, you know
it was for them, it was a very simple initial
use case, which was like, we just want to personalize
our local store marketing. Yeah, and we need a way
to use data to use that, and then we need
(04:47):
a way to measure how successful those efforts are. And
it's really it's expanded from there to incorporate the menu operations,
all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Let's talk about the the idea of AI usage. I mean,
it's been more and more of a topic here on
our network as we cover it on across a lot
of the podcasts. But when you look at the real
use case for the restaurant industry, many people will point
to back a house. Possibly we could see it in
the operational side in terms of equipment AI integration to
(05:16):
where you you know, there's just less of the everyday
functionality of someone running an additional machine or having another
body back there that maybe AI could be the potential
holy grail of back of house. What is your opinion.
Do you think we're going to see it more on
back of house or do you think we're going to
see more customer facing stuff?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I think, honestly, I think the short answer is we'll
probably see it everywhere over time.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
I would caution anybody from thinking.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
That there are really good, you know, game changing use
cases for AI in the restaurant industry, and I would
apply that actually to I mean, I think about it
this way right like I don't. I'm thinking about how
I use AI in my life as a founder and CEO,
and I'm only just still feel like I'm scratching the
surface of what it's capability for me in my work,
(06:05):
let alone someone who is, you know, trying to execute
perfectly across order prep, across hiring and labor management, across
inventory management, across P and L management. And so I
think again, this is the arc of AI is long,
and adoption and value will take time to create. That
being said, you know, there are some options to take
(06:27):
some of the low hanging fruit, the more manual work
that operators are doing, and automate some of those through AI. Right,
exactly what I think of is, you know, there's obviously
a very high correlation from responding to reviews on Yelp
and Google with having a higher profile, and then you
get surface more in the search results, and that leads
to higher sales and traffic, and it can be very
(06:49):
you know, when my mother in law came home from
at the end of the day, the last thing she
wants to do is flip open her computer at eleven
thirty at night and say, let me respond to all
my Google reviews. But that being said, yeah, you could
use AI, and maybe it doesn't remove the personal touch,
but you could start to use AI to at least
engage guests who leave good reviews yeah, or flag the
(07:10):
ones that are potentially negative reviews that need your time
as an operator, need some of your valuable time to
investigate and understand.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
What I've talked to.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I've talked to a lot of operators that have kind
of said, hey, listen, I'm starting to use it in
workflow management, whether it's hiring, much like to your point
customer service to a certain level, being able to do
more and easier, I should say, functional workflow projects that
they might be like a training manual, or maybe they're
doing something, you know, in a market research around real
(07:41):
estate all that kind of those seem to be much
more clerical and more functional tools and tasks for a
restaurant operator. But once you get inside the operations, then
that's where it gets to be a question for me
is just how quickly is it going to come and
become a thing I hear? And I've talked to a
lot of different technology companies that are starting to move
(08:03):
in this space. I had one company on not too
long ago that was talking about agentic AI and what
they had done is creating AI agents to kind of
create these mundane task scenarios that might play out in
just through a food order. This is one of the
early stage companies that we've talked with, and this could
(08:23):
be a factor going forward, especially if we see a
new interface. Do you think there is a possibility that
because AI is moving so quickly on the consumer front,
that maybe we see some AI front ends coming at
restaurants in unique ways through like ordering, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Yeah, I think voice is the big thing that obviously
a lot of people are exploring, you know, and I
won't it's still amazing to me that even within our
guest base that you have high single digit percentages of
orders for some brands right right being calling being phone orders,
And I think there's a very there are some really
(09:01):
good founders out there that are experimenting with ways to
basically automate.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
That entire process.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
I mean using a voice, a natural human sounding voice,
to answer the phone, take the order, send place the order, PULD,
send a payment link, like I have a friend of
mine who's working on this right now, and it is
pretty minimally like as a user, you don't necessarily know
you're talking to an AI. And I think that'll get
(09:27):
even better over time, meaning it'll be harder to kind
of perceive are you talking to a.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Human our emissions?
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, from an experience standpoint, Like my whole philosophy with
restaurants is, you know, if you look at sort of
what happened with retail a decade ago, you had this
hollowing out of the middle where you had, you know,
the department stores like Macy's, JC Penny, the things that
tried to be everyone for everything, for everyone, they sort
of kind of lost away. But if you look at
(09:56):
sort of where the spectrum went, people either anchored on
convenience or experience, and I think the same thing is
going to happen to the restaurant industry, for better or worse.
And so things like voice ordering and AI and voice
AI for ordering leans into a convenience aspect where you
are someone who is trying to serve I think in
(10:17):
my mother in law again, you are someone who's trying
to serve the guest in store, someone who's actually sitting
down and spending their hard earned dollars and wants that
more experiential environment. The last thing you want to do
is rip away from the guest experience and answer phone
and take a phone order, which is what again my
mother in law would do. And so, you know, taking
some of this low hanging fruit and enabling operators to
(10:38):
serve more guests more frictionlessly through technology, I think is
certainly a powerful trend that will continue and enhances the
overall guest experience.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, I wonder if we're going to see that point
where the customer's leverage of AI tools themselves becomes a superpower.
You know, if you think about find me the best reservation,
find me the restaurants that do this, this or that,
especially on travel planning. I know we've started to do
that within our own family. I've been surprised at how
(11:12):
well it does going into a city. I'm traveling to
DC here soon, and I gave it a whole litany
of things to do. And this was perplexity, I think,
and it came back with some fairly competent answers that
I was like, that's not bad. I mean, I might
do a little bit better on this topic. But do
you think that consumers are now going to kind of
(11:34):
have that one up on where the industry is going? Well?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
I think so, But you know, I think consumers are
for better or worse, you know, because of how I
never like when people say restaurant operators are slow to
adopt technology because they don't think technology can work for them.
I don't think that's true. I think the business is
so demanding that is genuinely hard to take time out
of your day to be like, what's the latest tech
(12:00):
trend and how can I adopt it for my business? Right,
you're just working in the business so much that it's
hard to work on the business, and so a lot
of the tech trends that happen in this industry for
better or worse are consumer are changes on the consumer
side that drag the restaurant industry along with them. Marketplaces
are a great example of this. Now to your question
(12:20):
specifically around will consumers sort of be on the front
end of AI and will that bring restaurants along.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I saw a post.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I saw the CEO of par which is a big
publicly traded company in our industry. He tweeted or he
wrote something on LinkedIn interest recently which was what happens
to the third party delivery platforms in a role in
the world of agentic and voice AI where you can
say to an AI, go do this, or order me
a burger from shakeshak ye, you know, and it's all
(12:48):
through your voice, and it's like, okay, what do you want? Okay,
do you want? What are the modifiers that you want?
Do you want to and it up sells you through
the power of your voice. Where does that order actually
get placed? Does it through a phone call to that restaurant,
does it happen on the restaurant's direct online ordering platform,
or does it happen through the third party delivery platform?
And I think that is a very interesting, like a
(13:09):
nuanced case where we aren't even grappling with the with
the ramifications of that type of behavior. I think we're still,
you know the world of ais progressing quickly, so we're
probably at least twelve months away from something like that happening.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
It's actually happening now. We just we saw one of
the tests that was done at a project build not
too long ago on blockchain, and this was a company
that was doing a gentic ai and they were using
basically using blockchain to track the payment mechanism that converted
it into US dollars, but they were using some webbooks
(13:43):
directly with Postmates and uber eats to be able to
execute on it. Sure, on the restaurant side, it goes
back to that kind of that tablet farm that used
to exist in third party delivery where you had a
tablet from everyone. I wonder if that will be the
factor going forward, But that has been done with agentic ai.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
The question will be is when does a restaurant build
their own agent and that is able to handle it
and handle whether it's up selling, you know, dynamic pricing,
all sorts of things that could play into this. Do
you think that will be coming first?
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I think that's tough for you know, and like our
sort of philosophy at BICKI here from a from a
customer data and analytics standpoint is, you know, and we
work with brands that are up to one thousand units.
And the way we like to frame it is always
like you're in the business of ordering, of making food, and.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Executing on the guest experience.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
Like that is your at the end of the day
when you think about, like source what drives retention in
a restaurant, Like, I'll just give you some high level stats,
like typically we have about three hundred and fifty guest profiles,
three hundred and fifty million guest profiles in our system.
And the thing that we found is that on average,
eighty percent of guests never come back after the first visit,
and the twenty percent that do come back can drive
anywhere from fifty to seventy five percent of a brand's revenue. Yeah,
(15:00):
and so making the food, executing on the food, and
executing on that experience is the highest probability thing that
you can do as a restaurant to increase frequency, drive retention,
and drive long term repeatable sales. Now Nowhere in that
equation does building technology factor in for better or worse.
And so I think to your question, maybe the biggest,
(15:22):
the top five, the top ten brands, McDonald's, Domino's, you know,
Chick fil A. They have engineering teams, they are thinking
about the cutting edge of leveraging AI and data and
machine learning. Maybe they will invest in building out some
of these capabilities. But I would say the other ninety
nine point nine percent of brands, it's hard enough doing
that number one priority well consistently enough over time that
(15:46):
again I think, you know, entrepreneurs, people who innovate in
the space will come in and provide some of that
value and make it easier for restaurants to use those
tools and use that technology to grow their businesses.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
What do you Okay, So let's jump over to adoption barriers,
because this could happen on two fronts. One front, of course,
is adoption in the restaurant space, which you, as a
tech company, has got to You've got a chance to
experience that very slow moving in terms of the restaurant
industry attaching to technology and being able to leverage it.
(16:18):
That's number one. Then you have the adoption cycle of
the consumer, which seems to be much faster. I mean,
we saw with social media. We've seen it with mobile
that all of that was kind of the restaurant industry
was kind of pulled through by the consumer. Do you
feel like that's going to be the case with a
lot of the AI tools.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
So yeah, I don't see a reason that could change.
I mean, the thing that the big exception, the big
caveat here and this will probably make me eat my words,
but you never know when someone's gonna when someone is
going to solve the operational toil for lack of our term,
involved in running the business in a day to day basis.
(16:57):
So the example that comes to mind is is if
you have an operator that can just say, hey, like
we're out of we're out of onions, like eighty six
everything with onions from my instore menu, my and my
delivery menu. Right Like, of course we will get to that.
I don't know what the timeline is, but we will
get to that point. And that's when you sort of
(17:19):
have the restaurant industry themselves trying to adopt some of
these technologies. But that being said, that always happened. Second,
the consumer. The consumer is the primary driver of what
sort of like brings the restaurant the restaurant business along
from a technology standpoint, like, even think about it with
my business, right, Like I started the business seven and
(17:40):
a half years ago, back in twenty seventeen, no one
cared about data for restaurants like I was out there.
Even my mother in law was like, this seems like
a great platform. I can't use it. Right. But then
when the pandemic happened and every consumer was like, I
still want to order food out, I don't want to
cook all the time. Then my phone started blowing up
and people were saying, hey, you talked to us about
(18:00):
data for the last two and a half years.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
I never see my guess anymore. Please help me figure
out who these guests are and how I can understand
them and serve them better.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Right.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
And so it was consumer switching their behavior and the
adoption of digital tools that force the restaurants to sort
of modernize their tech stacks for lack of a better term.
And I think that is the wave that we are
still riding today. And so I think there will be
breakthrough moment in AI from an ordering standpoint, probably that again,
(18:30):
you know, kicks off this next cycle for AI for operations,
AI for supply chain, AI for finance, AI for analysis,
which is some of the stuff that work.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
So there has been some discussion out there around some
of the vcs that are saying, hey, you know, with
AI tools, it's very possible that we could see you know,
the first handful of billion dollar businesses that are solo entrepreneurs,
you know. And if you translate that into a restaurant
(19:00):
and say, hmmm, what about a restaurant that could operate
at you know, maybe a five million dollar clip at
UV with half or one third of the staff. Do
you think that is a potential in the future of
where this goes.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
It's tough.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
I mean, I think it's I think it's it's good
to sort of speculate on a software side, But like restaurants,
are these are still still businesses you know manual Yeah, yeah,
these are still real businesses now. I think if the
question is will there be efficiencies, absolutely I think so.
But at the end of the day, like if you
look at five million dollar AUV at a twenty dollars
(19:40):
average check, my mental math is not good, but that's
a lot of transactions on a per score basis. That's
a lot of meals that you are serving to the
got someone's got to make them, Someone's still going to
make them, someone's still got a problem, someone still well.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
It depends on automation. I mean, Chipotle's done a fairly
good job on on creating some of the robot lines,
and it's very early stage. The couple of companies that
have already kind of gone down that direction where we
could see more, you know, assembly line style restaurants. Now,
granted you lose the hospitality model there with that for
the most part depends on how it's done. But do
(20:14):
you think it will have an impact on the design
of restaurants, because if you do get into robotic lines
and things of that nature, they're going to look different.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
They will, absolutely, I think. I mean, I think you're
seeing it with sneakering.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Right now and they're infinite cares exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Yeah, that is they are, and you know they can serve.
I forget what the numbers are, but from a store
level margin standpoint, I think their traditional stores are eighteen
percent in the infinite kitchens are twenty five percent.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Wow, the store level margins like seven.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Hundred baits of that is huge, huge, huge dollars that
are going to the bottom line, and that's why it's
half of all new bills now moving forward, and I
think eventually be one hundred percent of volume the builds
moving forward. So I think I think you're seeing that
where the restaurants will look different because there are labor benefits,
there are through put benefits, which is what really dry
like that nomination is what can help them hopefully become
(21:03):
a more profitable entity over the long term.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
But I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
I think it will change design in ways that we
aren't even speculating. Like you look at the pandemic, like
the dining seventy percent of the business off premise.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Most of it's still drive through. They're still growing.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
But almost every brand I can think of that we
work with in the QSR fast casual space, the only.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Saying I need a dining room.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
No one is saying a bigger dining groups. Everybody is
looking to get smaller and serve more people with through
smaller boxes.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Well and you with their party. And especially when we
see agents start to play into this in terms of
speed and throughput, and then you have enough automation, Yeah,
you're right, you could get to you know, boxes that
could do five million in rev that would be pretty significant.
And to your point on what you were talking about
with Sweet Greens, I mean that in itself when you
look at their advancement, because that's only going to get
(21:55):
better as we start to see the technology kind of
resolve itself over the next few years. All right, aban IV,
Let's get into the last couple of points I want
to hit at. One is when you look at the
space the industry right now, several sectors are growing fairly well,
and we had some surprises. Some of the surprises was Chili's.
(22:17):
Then Red Robin came in and did surprise here recently
on an earnings Is casual dining coming back?
Speaker 3 (22:24):
I don't know, you know, I think I did some
work where I was looking at the splits between the
brands we work with from QSR Fast Casual versus casual dining,
and what I found was, because everybody was saying, like
at the end of last year, right traffic is back,
(22:45):
you know, we're positive finally again September, October, November December,
that trend is going to continue early part of this year.
That is broadly held true for Fast Casual QSR. What
we're seeing in our brands is that those folks are
up load to mid single digits from a traffic standpoint,
which is incredible.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
That's where you want to be. Now.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
The thing that I can say about casual dining is
it's less negative. It was high single digit negative and
now it's mid single digit negative.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Well, I mean, you got but if you get some
wins like what Chipotle is not Chili's has done and
read Robin, I guess the question will be is can
it hold?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
You know, Kennedy's numbers hold.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
But I think they are sort of unique in that
they prove. They're the exceptions that prove that prove the
traditional restaurant playbook, which is great value, great food, great marketing.
If you hit those, it doesn't matter what. If you
hit those three things, you're going to knock it out
of the park and do a great job. I think
both of those brands have been executing on those They've
(23:45):
been executing on them in different ways, but they have
those three core elements, which is why you are seeing
their off swing from a traffic standpoint. I think, like
if I zoom ahead right like this is still a
point of debate between me and and you know, founder
friends as well as operators that we work with on
where does casual dining go from here? People still want
an experience. The problem that you see right now in
(24:06):
the short term is that casual dining is getting squeezed
by QSR and Fast Casual right right because Fast casual
is casual level menu items food for a QSR level
price essentially, and QSR it anchors more onconvenience, and so
doubt people like I can get I can get.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
The same, it's solidy for more convenience. That's what I'm
gonna go.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Yeah, and it's been this is the age old scenario
that's come around since the midnight is when Fast Casual
really started its emergencies. Where would it pull from? It
pulls from the upper level, which is usually casual dining.
So we'll see how it plays out. Twenty twenty five
is just getting started here. We're going to find out
quickly how some of these markets start to resolve. Abanav
If people want to find you, where's the best place?
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Biki dot com b i kk y dot com is
the website you can reach me directly. A'banov abhi navy
at biki dot com. One thing we did not talk about,
which I am excited for from an AI standpoint that
I'd be remiss not to mention is you know, Paul,
you and I were talking about where does this go
as a data company. It's like AI is sort of
part and parcel of our strategy for this year because
(25:13):
to what I said earlier, my mother in law and
in the beginning was like, this looks awesome. I don't
really have the time to use it everything. With what
AI will do, generally speaking, it will make insights more accessible,
to make the ability to execute and build a thriving restaurant.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Well analyzing the data itself. I mean we're using it
even in our own tools to analyze audience demographics, all
that within the podcast. I'm amazed. We used to have
a data scientist that did all that work. We still
have him, but he's doing other things now because.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Value things, I bet. Yeah, exactly, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Because AI is really kind of stepped in to do
a lot of that work. So very cool having you
on the show today. Thanks so much for stopping in.
I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Thanks for having me. It's great being here.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
You bet all right. If you guys are not tuned
in over on YouTube, make sure and drop into save
just search that on YouTube. You'll find us there. Subscribe
to the show if you're watching this, if you are
listening to this podcast, all you have to do is
leave us a star over there on whether it's Spotify
or Apple iTunes, either one of those will work great.
We'll catch you next time right here on the Restaurant
Report
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