real_aurgathor I’m not so sure if being “The Most AI-Forward Restaurant Company” is good, but I’ll give them the benefit of doubt until there is some evidence.
Theoretically this is one of the things AI should absolutely excel at and be a huge boom to businesses. Humans have limited bandwidth - we can’t look at millions or billions of data points and tens of thousands of trends of information with great efficiency or efficacy. We frankly suck at seeing the trees for the forest when it comes to understanding what huge amounts of raw information are telling us.
AI can look at the purchases of every single customer that has ever been in any red lobster store that they have the data saved in their POI systems from and can take multiple years of purchases and crunch those numbers in much finer detail and look for far more trends than any human could - store by store, hour by hour, day by day, cross referencing what staff was working in the kitchen and on the sales floor, what the weather was like, how long people stayed in the store, what exactly they bought, how different items are comingled in various purchases, how purchases and visit length vary between tables, and thousands of other variables that would take teams of humans months or years to look at across hundreds of stores. AI can crunch all that out in a matter of hours or even minutes and provide information on what works and what doesn’t work. How much of which goods should be purchased when. how many staff should be working each hour of each day, what tables should customers be sat at first, when store opening and closing hours should be at various times of the year, and the list goes on.
Trying to understand the “unpredictability” of humans is something AI can do better than we can - especially over wide swaths of data points. Its just a matter of them hiring and using some skilled folks to pull the data and crunch it properly - they need a team of people that consists of good smart folks with data analysis skills, sociology skills, restaurant industry skills, AI skills, and probably a few other soft skills that could really dig in and provide every store manager at every location with deep insight into what does and doesn’t work, and update that daily, weekly, and monthly as they try different things.