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