Operational Intelligence: AI Takes Orders, Coaches Employees, and Helps Franchisees Operate Smarter

If you haven’t been introduced yet, meet Bo-Linda, Archy, and Patty. Big things are expected from them.

They aren’t new franchisees or innovative general managers. They are among the custom-branded AI systems revolutionizing the quick-service restaurant industry.

Bo-Linda takes drive-thru orders at Bojangles. Archy could soon be doing the same at McDonald’s if a testing phase goes well. Patty, a chatbot that coaches employees on everything from friendliness to food prep, is expected to be in Burger King headsets nationwide by the end of the year.

From automating order taking and evaluating hospitality to forecasting labor needs and analyzing inventory, AI is being quickly and not-so-quietly incorporated into nearly every facet of franchising.

The digital data aggregator World of Statistics compared the amount of time it took some past technologies to reach 100 million users worldwide:

• The telephone, 75 years
• Mobile phones, 16 years
• The internet, seven years
• Instagram, two and a half years
• ChatGPT, two months

Whether test piloting AI technology or aggressively scaling it, brands are betting that the tools will help them optimize network efficiency, labor, and accuracy. Those improvements won’t just affect bottom lines, franchisors say. They will lead to the ultimate goal: a better customer experience.

Bo-Linda is currently holding down drive-thru windows at 452 of Bojangles’ 800-plus locations. And the AI-powered voice assistant is work-ing with stunning accuracy. Human intervention is required only 1 to 2% of the time, says Richard Del Valle, the brand’s chief of staff and chief information officer.

“It nails what I call the technology trifecta, which means it’s good for the employees, it’s good for the owners on a variety of levels, and it’s good for the guests. It’s pretty rare that you find something that can do all three things,” Del Valle says. “When we went into this, we weren’t 100% sure where all the wins were going to be, but the consistency piece of the experience, the no-delay at the drive-thru, the reliability piece of having something like this, those have all really been a game changer for us.”

AI has gone from an experiment to an everyday business tool with staggering speed, says Kristin Kidd, chief operating officer at Head to Toe Brands, whose portfolio includes 200 units across Frenchies Modern Nail Care, Bishops Cuts/Color, The Lash Lounge, and Delta Crown Extensions.

“AI has gone from this future robot stage to something that everyone uses every day, whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini, etc. People are using it in their regular lives, but also people are realizing how it could help them at work,” she says. “Everyone is coming of age at the same time with their understanding of how AI can be helpful to them.”

BOJANGLES

Del Valle views Bo-Linda almost like a skilled and knowledgeable extra employee who never leaves the customer idling at the drive-thru reader board.

“She’ll take a guest through the order. If we’re featuring a product, she’ll recommend that to you as she welcomes you. She will ask every question that needs to be asked to ensure that you will get exactly what you want,” he says. “And she’s also capable of answering questions. You can say something like, ‘What kind of dipping sauces do you have?’ She’ll tell you. Or ‘What’s on a Bo’s Chicken Sandwich?’ She’ll describe the bun, the chicken, the mayonnaise, and the pickles, etc. So really, it’s a super powerful order-interaction tool. On top of everything else, Bo-Linda is fluent in conversational Spanish.”

Customers like that there’s no delay when they pull up to the menu and there are no mistakes when they get their order, he says. Employees appreciate Bo-Linda because “we’ve taken 35% of the workload away from those drive-thru folks,” Del Valle says. They can focus on the hospitality that Bojangles is known for when customers pick up their orders. “Frankly, from an ownership perspective, that kind of consistency is great for the brand,” he says.

A lot of forethought went into fine-tuning Bo-Linda before the tool was widely rolled out in 2025. Del Valle and others at Bojangles headquarters describe the tool as an overnight sensation that was six months in the making.

When guests are dealing with humans, they can ask an employee for anything. Seven pickles on that sandwich? Okay. A hollowed-out biscuit because they don’t want as much bread with their breakfast sandwich? No problem.

However, it takes a great deal of planning for an AI agent to be able to do that.

“It needs to have a PLU, a price look-up number, for anything that the guest might want. The biggest challenge for us in the initial testing phase was making sure that we captured every possible thing that a guest might want and then creating inside our point-of-sale system a corresponding item that the AI could call up,” Del Valle says. “We added, in the first month, something around 550 unique menu items just so that we could accommodate anything that a guest was going to ask for. The worst thing that can happen is our team members have to intercept or get involved in an order. We’ve worked super hard to minimize that.”

Bojangles hasn’t mandated that every franchisee in its network implement Bo-Linda. Of the 452 locations where the technology is in use, 280 are brand-owned stores. The rest are owned by franchisees who can see its value. Some operators want to wait, and that’s fine, Del Valle says. The company invites not-yet-willing franchisees to see it in person, and within about 15 minutes, all concerns usually disappear, he says.

Because the brand prides itself on being on the leading edge of technology, its use of artificial intelligence extends beyond the drive-thru.

“We use an AI engine to do our sales forecasting for the restaurants. It’s very sophisticated. It looks at weather patterns. It understands the ef-fect of, say, here in Charlotte, if the Panthers are playing at home or playing away. It’s actually learning what impact that has on sales flow for us and timing for us. It looks at historical trends. It does an absolutely fantastic job. We’re talking about accurate to within 0.5 to 0.75% on a weekly basis on what we are going to actually do for sales,” Del Valle says.

“That’s super important because then another AI engine takes over and helps our managers build a perfect schedule that aligns with when we expect the business to come and where we expect it to come,” he continues. “So, for instance, it’s not as simple as we’re going to have $500 in sales between noon and 1 p.m. on Thursday. We actually are able to tell that $350 of that is going to come through the drive-thru, and $100 is going to walk into the dining room, and $50 is going to be third-party delivery. Then, the system is sophisticated enough to put the right people in the right place to deal with that breakdown of the sales.”

Yet another AI system takes those sales forecasts and predicts what will be sold: how many chicken dinners, how many chicken sandwiches, and so forth.

“AI is really backboning a tremendous amount of our operational infrastructure at the moment,” he says. “It doesn’t replace humans. We still have our GMs take those schedules that the system produces and look at them and massage them. The GM knows things that the system doesn’t know. For instance, some people work really well together, and some people don’t. On the food ordering, we tell our managers, ‘Scan it and make sure it makes sense to you. Never take anything for granted.’”

De Valle knows there are limits to what the technology can do. And he wants to make sure that employees understand that.

“Whenever we have a new user of an AI tool, like Claude or ChatGPT, we always tell them, ‘Listen, do me a favor. Pick a subject you’re 100% an expert on and ask the AI to tell you about it. If you get something back that you absolutely think is perfect, great. You can kind of start to feel a little bit of confidence.’ But what you will get back, most of the time, is something that’s slightly less than perfect. I think that grounds people in understanding AI as a tool. It doesn’t replace your brain. It can speed up analysis work or mundane work. But at the end of the day, we still need human interaction.”

LITTLE CAESARS

Long ago, Little Caesars cemented its reputation as a restaurant industry pioneer.

Soon after Mike and Marian Ilitch invested their $10,000 life savings to buy their first pizza restaurant in a Detroit suburb in 1959, they started rolling out groundbreaking ideas: two-for-one pizza deals, conveyor belt ovens developed to keep up with the massive demand, the mobile Love Kitchen to feed communities in need, and the franchise’s famous no-wait, Hot-N-Ready concept. Given that legacy, the brand’s decisive leap into AI isn’t surprising.

“Little Caesars has always been rooted in innovation. Our founder, Mr. Ilitch, was the consummate innovator, and so AI is really a continued extension of that,” says Vice President of Innovation Trish Heusel. “We think about it from a whole operating system perspective. We’re in the stage where we’ve got some AI tools that are rolled out, some that are being piloted, and some that we’re considering. But all of them are focused on what the core of Little Caesars really is, which is convenience. How can we make things more convenient for our guests and for our team members in the restaurants?”

Customers can now use ChatGPT to place an order, a new feature launched this summer. It can advise and make recommendations to ensure that customers get exactly what they want.

“You could say, ‘I definitely need a meat pizza, but I’m having two vegetarians over, and I have six people total. How many and what should I order?’ It then links you directly to ordering that,” Heusel says.

Depending on where customers live, pizza deliveries might come in unexpected ways. “In a number of our markets, we’re testing autonomous delivery with drones or with sidewalk robots or bike-lane robots,” she says.

Inside the restaurants, Little Caesars, which is the third largest pizza franchise in the world, has integrated AI to analyze and optimize its production sequencing for Hot-N-Ready pizzas. AI helps answer the question, “How many should we make given what’s happening in the world today?” Heusel says. “Maybe there’s a baseball game in the area. Maybe last year, there was a big county fair or a big game night, and we know that was a big night for us.”

None of it is “AI for AI’s sake,” Heusel says. Little Caesars is intentional about using the technology where it can be most helpful.

“It can really assist the managers so that they can spend time on things they need to spend time on,” she says.

For franchisees, AI tools allow them to focus on their employees, training, and “delivering what we want the brand to be to our guests,” Heusel says.

Because of that, restaurant operators have welcomed it.

“Our franchisees are probably like most franchisees. They’re really looking for ‘How can you make our lives easier?’” she says. “We see AI doing that, and they’re happy to have us explore different solutions.”

HEAD TO TOE

The embrace of AI reaches across the franchise world. Home-repair franchises are employing AI technology to optimize dispatching, cost quotes, and sales coaching. Health and wellness-related brands are using AI tools to create personalized workout plans for customers and to improve member retention. Beauty brands are turning to AI while still prioritizing the artistry and human touch that their customers seek.

AI tools are “never going to take over doing someone’s lashes. They’re never going to take over cutting your hair or coloring your hair. They’re never going to take over doing your nails. All of those are personal services that someone does because they want that me time,” says Kidd of Head to Toe Brands. “AI needs to fit in where you need it to fit in. Can it help you answer phones? Can it help you answer text messages? Can it help you with some marketing ideas or give you data quicker, so you’re not having to go to 10 different platforms? That’s where AI could fit into a personal services industry.”

Head to Toe uses AI not only to expedite data, but to make it available on a single dashboard, which the company calls its Daily Actionable Real Time (DART) board.

From there, the franchisor, field coaches, and franchisees can track sales data and other key performance indicators. The DART board “pulls in data from several key sources, such as marketing, point of sale, etc., and it helps our franchisees on a daily basis see the things that are very important to them,” Kidd says.

Franchisees can see appointments on the books, whether a service provider has left notes, and information on those who haven’t rebooked, which helps with retention and win backs. “For example, we can see reviews that have come in that we need to deal with right away,” Kidd says.

AI also gives operators insights into who might be considering their services. “If someone decides they’re interested in hair or nails or lashes, they might click on a Meta ad or search on Google, and it allows us to instantly call or text them. It puts it right there in front of franchisees on their dashboard as opposed to going to an email that someone might check once a day,” Kidd says.

From there, operators can track which potential clients they’ve reached out to and which ones have booked a service.

AI can help brands in myriad ways. But it’s important to retain authenticity, Kidd says. The public is becoming more AI-savvy. People can tell when an email, text, or marketing pitch is generated solely by a machine.

It’s the job of business owners to make sure that their voice comes through and that the communication is genuine. Otherwise, Kidd says, potential customers easily dismiss it.

“AI is really useful for helping formulate your thoughts. So, whether it is a post, an email, or responding to a negative review, it can help you put together those ideas. The goal, though, is to then take those words and rewrite them or edit them in your own voice,” she says. “Let’s say you get a negative review from a customer. As a business owner, that feels like a punch to the stomach. It’s so deflating and disheartening. You want to respond to them in a kind, appropriate manner that will help win them back. But if you’re not writing it in your own words or editing it in your own words, it’s not going to come across as authentic.”

Some franchisors don’t have guardrails and best practices in place, so they’re reluctant to take the AI plunge. It’s easy to feel behind given the astonishing speed of technological advances ushered in by AI, Kidd says.

“They see what it can do, and they’re kind of paralyzed in the sense of ‘How do I get this set up for my company and my team, so we’re all working off the same playbook?’” she says. “It’s so scary because it’s moving so fast.”

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI has moved beyond the pilot phase. Franchise brands are rapidly integrating artificial intelligence into day-to-day operations from drive-thru ordering and scheduling to inventory management and customer engagement.
• The goal isn’t fewer employees. Brands are using AI to automate repetitive tasks so that team members can spend more time serving customers and delivering hospitality.
• Data drives better decisions. AI is helping operators forecast sales, optimize labor, manage inventory, and identify customer retention opportunities with greater accuracy.
• Customer experience remains the priority. Faster service, improved order accuracy, and personalized interactions are among the biggest benefits brands expect from AI.
• Human judgment still matters. Executives say AI works best as a decision-support tool, not a replacement for experienced managers or authentic customer relationships.