Where It Fits: Savvy Development Teams Use AI Purposely

AI isn’t coming to franchise development. It’s already here, and the gap between teams using it effectively and those that aren’t is widening. Some tools are brand new. Others have been quietly improving franchise development for years. They all serve the same purpose: eliminating the administrative work around candidate engagement so that development teams can spend more time building relationships. Here’s where leading teams are putting AI to work.

Appointment Setting

Long before generative AI entered the conversation, companies like Lumin.ai and FranFunnel were already using earlier forms of AI to help franchise development teams become more efficient and more responsive. Appointment setting was one of the first proof points that AI could take real work off a recruiter’s plate without taking the relationship out of the process. Response times improved, and leads stopped falling through the cracks. What we had then was conversational AI doing the basics. It was useful—and felt revolutionary at the time—but it worked through fixed questions and preset responses. Generative AI took the same idea and gave it range.

Note-Taking

This tool predates ChatGPT, but it remains one of AI’s most useful applications. As you’re speaking with candidates during the discovery process, use tools that record and transcribe your calls automatically, so you can fully pay attention and actively listen without worrying that you won’t have the right notes to remember everything later.

Smart teams are taking this capability a step further: loading call transcripts into AI tools to analyze sentiment, track talking versus listening time for training purposes, and pull together executive briefs for candidate award decisions. What started as a simple transcription tool has become a real coaching and decision-support layer.

Reporting

These days, when your CRM doesn’t have the exact report you need, you can use AI tools to build it. At DOXA, we pull two separate reports from our CRM and load them into our AI tool of choice along with the prior week’s report. The output is a pipeline movement report that gives us a clear weekly view of advanced, stalled, and lost candidates. There's no more settling for whatever the CRM’s default reporting allows or waiting on a developer to build it.

Take it one step further and build a weekly agent that sweeps your reports folder, creates the desired output, and emails it to your team. You have just saved hours of weekly administrative work. Those saved hours go back into revenue-driving activity: strategy planning, franchisee check-ins for validation, and additional candidate conversations.

Presentations

Creating PowerPoint decks for intro webinars, broker pitches, or discovery days used to eat entire afternoons. Not anymore. If you’re not using AI tools to complete polished, final decks in 20 minutes, you’re wasting time. And if your process requires a final pass from the marketing team, AI gets you a solid draft fast. It will be specific enough to share exactly what you want and avoid rounds of back-and-forth. This is one of the most immediate, low-effort wins available to development teams right now, and there’s very little reason not to be using it.

Research

Whether you’re tracking the competitive landscape to determine how to position your brand or studying candidates before a call, AI tools have become invaluable in the research step.

Like everything involving AI, though, you have to remain the human in the loop. Don’t take results at face value. Check citations, review multiple sources, and make sure you’re relying on trustworthy information before it shapes a brand position or a candidate conversation. Faulty candidate research can especially be a relationship killer before it even starts. Mentioning an outdated role, wrong company, or misread background can signal to a qualified prospect that they weren’t worth your preparation time.

What Stays Human

None of these tools replace the role of franchise development, which is to build relationships based on trust and judgment and determine the right candidates for awarding and growing your franchisee roster. AI tools take the friction out of everything that supports the role: the scheduling, the notes, the reports, the decks, the research. That frees up time and attention for the part of the job AI can’t do, which is sitting across from a candidate and helping them make one of the biggest decisions of their life.

The teams getting ahead right now aren’t the ones with the most AI tools. They’re the ones who know exactly which parts of the job to hand off and which parts stay firmly theirs. 

Christina Chambers is the chief franchise officer at DOXA Talent, where she leads strategy and franchise growth for the purpose-driven brand known for its “conscious outsourcing” model that helps entrepreneurs build recurring revenue businesses with integrity. Learn more at doxafranchising.com.