Dave's Hot Chicken is making significant investments in artificial intelligence to provide the restaurant chain with a competitive advantage in the fried chicken market.

But he is cautious not to lose the human touch of hospitality. That AI-enabled drive-thru—a trendy application of AI that historically hasn’t had the smoothest deployment for larger chains including McDonald’s and Taco Bell—isn’t intended to replace workers. “Our strategy is to allow the human to do more with the robot assistant,” says Davoyan.

The effective implementation of AI, robotics, and other advanced technologies might provide Dave’s Hot Chicken with a competitive advantage in the rapidly expanding and intensely contested chicken restaurant sector, which features established names such as Chick-fil-A and Popeyes, alongside rapidly growing ventures like Raising Cane’s, Hangry Joe’s Hot Chicken & Wings, and Dave’s itself. According to market research firm Datassential, quick-service and fast-casual chicken establishments increased their domestic locations by 4.7% in 2024 compared to the preceding year, accompanied by a sales increase of almost 10%. 

Enhancing Dave's Hot Chicken's ordering capabilities with AI has been a primary objective for Davoyan for the last eighteen months and will remain a key area of attention in 2026. He has introduced AI for drive-thru orders and anticipates that insights gained from this implementation can inform the development of large language models, potentially deployable for comparable features within the company's mobile application.

Dave’s Hot Chicken, which was acquired by private equity firm Roark Capital in a deal valued at around $1 billion earlier this year, is also working with several vendors to develop more precise predictions for when food will be ready. The times are then displayed on a digital order board within the store. When stores are busy, orders can take up to 45 minutes to be ready. Davoyan says he wants the predictive technology to get inside two minutes of accuracy. 

At the test stores where these systems have been deployed, Davoyan says the chain is adding seven to eight more transactions per week above locations that don’t have this feature. “The hypothesis is becoming true that if you serve up order-ready times more accurately, then the orders will come,” he adds.

Dave's Hot Chicken has likewise introduced some text-based enhancements for mobile purchases, and moving forward, Davoyan states his intention to incorporate in-app order progress notifications akin to those provided by DoorDash and Uber Eats.

At the front counter of the restaurant, Dave’s Hot Chicken has deployed kiosks, which are positioned to be slightly tilted so the cashier can monitor ordering progress and step in if there are any issues. The company says 23% of in-restaurant orders are booked by the kiosks today, and they increase the check amount by an average of 5.9%. Davoyan says this revenue generation results in a return on investment that’s under a year.

“We don’t remove the human element,” says Davoyan. “We have yet to reduce head count with all the things that we’re testing.”

Davoyan has also implemented Microsoft Copilot throughout the main office, although he isn't entirely convinced about the technology's readiness. “I think there are other solutions that we should explore,” he remarks.

Within other internal uses for AI, customer service stands out. Here, positive restaurant evaluations receive an AI-generated reply that's posted automatically on the internet. Conversely, reviews containing more negative comments are first examined and modified by a customer service representative, after which the AI-prepared response is given final approval.

Artificial intelligence is also being deployed for drone and rover deliveries and will be integrated into the company’s pair of experimental robotic arms at the fry station. “We’re going to use AI to predict how many fries we’re going to need,” states Davoyan, who aims for these robots to generate a continuous supply of fresh fries without compromising food quality.

He says that the autonomous french fry functionality is seeing a return on investment, but not yet below the two-year threshold that Dave’s Hot Chicken looks for when spending on tech. “Robots are very expensive,” says Davoyan. “It creates a barrier of entry for restaurants.”

Dave’s Hot Chicken also managed to completely avoid the Amazon Web Services cloud outage that ensnared tech firms, banks, and airlines in October. The company’s point of sale system relies on the vendor Qu, which has installed a physical device that runs cloud locally in every store. “We made all of our customers deploy the edge device,” says Amir Hudda, Qu’s CEO, whose other clients include Blaze Pizza and Jack in the Box. None of those restaurants were impacted by the AWS shutdown.

Davoyan notes that Infrastructure is often overlooked due to the consistent dependability provided by major tech firms such as Amazon and Microsoft to their clientele. However, significant service disruptions have grown more frequent, affecting Cloudflare in the previous month and Microsoft Azure during October. Given that eateries function with very narrow profit margins, they are unable to absorb revenue losses that occur when point-of-sale systems fail, forcing a halt to orders or manual processing.

“We knew that the day would come where there would be some level of meltdown and because we have high volume locations, we made that a priority,” says Davoyan. “You should always have a backup plan.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

OpenAI issues "Code Red" as Google mounts challenge. The Wall Street Journalreports on a company memo issued this week by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that declared a "code red" to focus efforts on bolstering ChatGPT, including increasing its speed and reliability, and put less effort on other products. This comes less than a month after Google's newest model, Gemini 3, won rave reviews for its capabilities in reasoning, coding, and some tasks performed by AI chatbots. In other news on OpenAI, the company on Monday announced it would acquire an equity interest in Thrive Holdings, a transaction that would permit OpenAI to integrate additional AI functionalities into firms offering accounting and IT support. Concurrently, the artificial intelligence venture also struck a deal accenture has provided ChatGPT Enterprise access to its vast workforce, numbering in the tens of thousands.

Nvidia makes yet another AI investment. The AI chipmaker announced it bought a $2 billion a stake in Synopsys, representing an enhanced collaboration between the two entities as they intend to combine Nvidia's artificial intelligence features with Synopsys' design tools aimed at R&D departments in various industries such as aviation and vehicle manufacturing. Nvidia has been actively investing in AI, most recently pouring $100 billion into OpenAI, $15 billion alongside Microsoft in Anthropic, and $5 billion in Intel.

DeepSeek debuts new AI models that rival OpenAI, Google. A Chinese AI venture called DeepSeek unveiled two fresh iterations of a trial AI system, asserting they rival certain functionalities of OpenAI's GPT-5 and Google's Gemini-3 Pro. Bloomberg reports venturebeat reports that the latest AI models possess novel functionalities enabling them to integrate reasoning and perform specific tasks independently. Reports the assertion of equivalence with DeepSeek's competitors in the U.S. Stems from evaluations conducted on math, programming, and logical deduction challenges. A consistent series of new AI model introductions has occurred recently, featuring releases from Anthropic, Google, and Runway—the latter entity revealed on Monday a new video model it says is good at understanding physics, human motion, camera movements, and cause and effect.

HP cutting jobs as it contends with higher chips costs. The PC maker announced it would reduce its workforce by 4,000 to 6,000 individuals through fiscal year 2028 as it intends to increase its utilization of AI technologies in domains such as product creation, client assistance, and sales and promotion, Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores informed Bloomberg. The corporation has lately seen advantages from heightened interest in new AI PCs but is simultaneously confronting elevated costs for memory chips, which is diminishing earnings. Reductions in staff have also been recently disclosed at Apple, which cut some sales jobs, and at Verizon, with the telecommunications giant trimming 13,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce. The cuts across major tech giants comes as a recent KPMG survey indicated that 52% of American employees are concerned AI might take their positions, a worry that has almost doubled compared to the previous year.

Campbell’s fires IT exec after accusations of racist remarks caught on audio. Campbell’s last week disclosed martin Bally, a Vice President of IT, has departed from the food conglomerate following an internal review of an audio recording where the executive purportedly stated that the company's offerings were “highly processed food” for “poor people.” The audio evidence emerged as a component of an ongoing lawsuit alongside a previous staff member who asserted Bally had uttered discriminatory comments concerning Indian laborers. Bally had been employed at Campbell’s for close to four years and had formerly held technology management positions at automotive producer Stellantis and auto parts provider American Axle & Manufacturing.

ADOPTION CURVE

Real estate industry embraces AI but few are fully pleased with their AI pilots. The proportion of corporate real estate property managers engaged in AI pilot programs has dramatically increased, climbing from just 5% in 2023 to an impressive 92% as of July this year. Furthermore, these property occupiers are actively exploring an average of five distinct pilot initiatives concurrently, covering a wide array of applications that span from document handling and energy optimization to the planning stages of design and construction, as indicated by a survey from a survey of more than 1,000 senior commercial real estate decision-makers, which was carried out by JLL, a firm specializing in commercial real estate and investment management.

“That is really surprising, because the commercial real estate industry is usually considered to be a laggard in terms of adopting technology,” says Yao Morin, CTO at JLL, in an interview with Coins2Day.

Still, Morin notes that the survey found that only 5% of CRE leaders report they have achieved “most program goals” with their AI pilots. She said some pain points that JLL has observed include the messiness of organizing real estate data, which relies on a lot of unstructured data from physical operations, and accurately measuring how much efficiency can actually be derived from AI tools.

Courtesy of JLL Research

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- Operation Smile is seeking a CIO, based in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Posted salary range: $145K-$165K/year.

- Veeam Software is seeking a field CTO for the Americas, a remote-based role. Posted salary range: $226.2K-$323.1K/year.

- Waterford Research Institute is seeking a CTO, a remote-based role. Posted salary range: $265K-$290K/year.

- The University of Vermont is seeking a deputy CTO, based in Jericho, Vermont. Posted salary range: $110K-$150K/year.

Hired:

- Expedia Group appointedXavier Amatriain as its inaugural chief AI and data officer, directing the strategic future of AI and machine learning for the travel technology firm. Amatriain is now part of Expedia, having previously been at Google as VP of AI and compute enablement. He also occupied significant roles at LinkedIn and Netflix, and has guided individuals who later established Perplexity and Scale AI.

- AmeriLifeappointedSulabh Srivastava has been appointed as CIO, with his reporting line to Tim Calvert, the chief operating officer. Before his tenure at the life and health insurance provider, Srivastava most recently held the position of global CIO at the insurance firm Acrisure. His prior experience includes serving as CTO at Sparrow Health System, located in Michigan, and as a VP of IT for Indiana University Health.

- Gecko Robotics has promoted Ed Bryner has been appointed to the position of CTO, promoting a foundational engineer to the executive leadership team following his arrival at the AI robotics firm as a founding engineer in 2016.

- Dualboot Partners promotedBilly Boozer has been appointed to the position of CTO, a mere five months after his arrival at the software development firm as VP of AI strategy and product innovation. Prior to this, Boozer was instrumental in founding multiple technology ventures, such as Letr, MerchantMob, and Boo Digital. He also previously occupied the CTO position at the payments service provider Secure Bancard.

- ZeroFox namedShon Myatt has been appointed as the Chief Technology Officer for the cybersecurity firm. Myatt comes to this role from Babel Street, a provider of risk intelligence solutions for both government enforcement bodies and commercial entities, where he held the positions of president and CTO following its inception in 2009.

- Duck Creek Technologies appointedRajesh Raheja has been appointed as CTO, tasked with supervising the engineering division and worldwide technology roadmap as the firm progresses with novel AI advancements for the insurance sector. Raheja transitions to the software developer from HPE, a cloud-software firm, where he held the position of SVP for the private cloud and AI software operations. Prior to that, he also functioned as chief engineering officer at Boomi, a software vendor.