AI Proving Ground Podcast
AI deployment and adoption is complex — this podcast makes it actionable. Join top experts, IT leaders and innovators as we explore AI’s toughest challenges, uncover real-world case studies, and reveal practical insights that drive AI ROI. From strategy to execution, we break down what works (and what doesn’t) in enterprise AI. New episodes every week.
AI Proving Ground Podcast
Jack in the Box CTO Reveals AI Playbook
Jack in the Box CTO Doug Cook and WWT Chief Digital Advisor Charlie Lawhorn detail how a multi-year modernization sprint paved the way for advancements in AI — and what every business can learn from the fast-food chain's journey. Doug and Charlie offer a candid conversation that delivers a playbook for prioritizing AI use cases, funding innovation in capital-constrained environments and rolling out AI with minimal disruption.
For more about this week's guests:
Doug Cook joined Jack in the Box as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer in October of 2021. Cook brings more than 20 years of industry experience leading guest and employee-facing platforms to Jack in the Box. Cook most recently served as interim CTO of Jack in the Box, effectively leading the technology team and strategy during his interim period. Prior to joining Jack in the Box, Cook served as Chief Information Officer at Pizza Hut. Before Pizza Hut, Cook spent two decades with Sonic applying leading-edge technologies and analytics to grow the company's innovation and market position.
Doug's top pick: Jack in the Box Case Study
Charlie Lawhorn is an experienced transformation leader with a career dedicated to designing and executing complex programs that help organizations navigate digital change. He specializes in aligning process design with modern digital technologies to enhance enterprise relevance and performance in a data-driven marketplace. Charlie leads teams that prioritize business outcomes, working closely with stakeholders to identify opportunities, apply the right processes and technologies and deliver measurable business value.
Charlie's top pick: Modernizing the Point of Sale at Jack in the Box to Drive Efficiency, Insights and Growth
The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.
Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.
The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.
Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.
From Worldwide Technology. This is the AI Proving Ground podcast. Today, jack in the Box, chief Technology Officer Doug Cook and WWT Chief Digital Advisor, charlie Lawhorn, give us a peek inside the QuickServe Restaurant's AI transformation journey, a multi-year effort that serves as a playbook for business leaders across all industries for prioritizing AI use cases and aligning teams and leadership to make it work. Thank you. Check on what it really takes to bring AI to the business with minimal disruption, so, as AI barrels toward your business, pay attention to how Doug and Charlie talk about stabilizing the basics before chasing the buzz. Line up every stakeholder with relentless, transparent communication and demand quick, measurable wins from each pilot before scaling it company-wide. This is the AI Proving Ground podcast everything AI all in one place. Let's dive in. Hey, doug, thanks for joining today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good to see you, Thank you.
Speaker 1:Charlie, good to see you, as always.
Speaker 3:Thanks, brian, great to be back.
Speaker 1:Well, I've been looking forward to this episode for quite some time. I saw the two of you actually speak together in a panel out in Monterey, california I think it was. I want to say 2021 or 2022. And, doug, you said something super insightful that I just want to repeat back because I wanted to kind of frame our conversation and kick off where we're at. You were talking about the need to stabilize infrastructure before you can modernize infrastructure in order to innovate, and your quote was my board was wanting to start with the sexy things like the store of the future, but I had to fix the core first. If our restaurants can't take or make or deliver an order, it doesn't matter what else we do. I wonder if you could take that quote and this was before generative AI even popped up onto the scene apply it to where we're at today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for that question, Brian. Yeah, I remember very vividly sitting there on stage in Monterey with Charlie talking about our business, and it's good to be with you again, Charlie, as well. So, yeah, I'm excited about where we're at today because we're squarely in the middle of that modernization phase, but we did have to spend back in 2021, when I joined the Jack in the Box family, some 18 months, brian and Charlie, focusing on stabilizing the systems. I talked to our team and our franchisees about this. Every time we get together, it doesn't matter what's at the top of that hype cycle, whether it's a Gen AI or you remember those days where it was big data or anything else that's going on that might be innovative. If we can't accept, an off-premise order or system is unstable and unreliable and not working for our business. So I talked to our team and our franchisees about uninterrupted operations, brian, and that's really the heart of the matter is our technology at Jack in the Box and Del Taco should never get in the way of running the business each and every day, and once we have that stability in place, we know that and we talk a lot about what we're capable of in the future, how we want to be competitive, how we want to leapfrog our competition with our technology.
Speaker 2:But it's required us to put together a roadmap of modernization to bring our technology from the outdated legacy we call it the vintage state that it's in today Vintage being that nice word for legacy Bringing it up to the modern kind of 2020 timeframe, where we then can position the technology to innovate and optimize and really drive the business going forward.
Speaker 2:So that's what I meant by that, because when I joined the business early on, the franchisees were talking to me about technology and again, it's inhibiting our ability to move forward. They would ask me questions like why can't we have tech like this other quick service restaurant has? And why is ours always breaking down? And largely because it wasn't stable, it was in the way, the way of the business, we weren't making the investments that we needed to make, uh, to really keep up and stay up, and so, as a result, that was my focus and really is my focus each and every day is ensuring the technology is not interrupting uh, you know the the transaction between us and our guests. So does that resonate with you, charlie? Does that make sense of what you see as you help so many other companies, including Jack in the Box.
Speaker 3:It does, and you know, doug, you also, when we first had that discussion, you were right in the middle of you know, the integration I'll call it of Jack and Del Taco and kind of thinking through that.
Speaker 3:So you kind of had a core stack with Jack, a core stack with Del, had to figure out how do you kind of combine those and then both do that at the same time as modernize.
Speaker 3:And I know that's been a multi-year journey for you and your teams and leadership really thinking through that, you and your teams and leadership really thinking through that. And I remember one of the other parts that I found just super interesting was, you know, balancing all of those technical duties and leadership duties with you know communicating effectively with your franchisee community and making sure that you know each one of your franchisee team members were aligned and on board. And you had a lot of different teams that had different opinions and perspectives. So you kind of jumped into the middle of a melting pot of all types of change and challenge and trying to get everybody aligned on a common path. I think that's one of the things that really astounded me was not just the technical challenges but the business challenges of building trust and getting the franchisees to feel like their investments were meaningful towards the future of your tech stack. So to me, it wasn't just the tech, it was that aligned with the business perspective as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, for me, you're right. The technical challenges were, and still are, vast. They're never ending in so many ways, because I'm learning something new about our architecture today that I didn't know several years ago, and it's evolving our roadmap and our plan and how we see target state. But I've had the opportunity to work with franchisees across three different brands and building that connection that you're talking about, that trusted connection, where I'm here not to sling around technology, I'm here to grow their business and grow our collective business and achieve the outcomes that really our board and our executive team we set out to accomplish.
Speaker 2:And so that's really meaningful to me and one way to do that, given that we're 95% franchise owned, it's really important to me that I have a strong, trusted relationship with the franchisees. Really important to me that I have a strong, trusted relationship with the franchisees. It's not always telling them what they want to hear. It's really. This is where we're at. We're not as mature as we want to be and I need your investment, I need your support, I need your guidance to help us evolve, build and evolve a roadmap that ultimately again achieves all of our goals and objectives. So it's really critical. It's at the heart of my job every single day and I'd argue that really probably any highly franchised quick service restaurant brand technology leader probably feels the same way I do and works at it the same way I do as well.
Speaker 3:I think the reason I remember that part of the topic so much is in this world of AI.
Speaker 3:With AI everywhere impacting all different parts of businesses, I actually see more and more companies having a similar challenge, not because they have the franchisees, but AI is a new technology that wasn't in many cases, budgeted for, and so people are having to go seek out funding and and to do that they're having to actually lobby their, their, their business stakeholders and their various teams, and it just it constantly makes me think of you having to having to make sure that you had that alignment with all of your franchise franchisees, because you know, ai didn't just the board, doesn't just give you another $50 million to go invest in AI.
Speaker 3:You have to find that 50 million and re-slice the pie, or 10 million or 2 million or whatever that is. You have to re-slice the pie and to do that you have to get a tremendous amount of stakeholders on board to go both investigate these technologies or even deploy these technologies. So again, I use that example from that discussion you and I had so many times of like. It's almost like a franchisee's model, and as soon as I say that people are like, that makes sense. So believe it or not, doug, whether they're actually in a franchisee model or not, more and more companies are having to solicit all of those different lines of business, all of those different groups, to get alignment around these new technologies that they didn't have to do a couple of years ago and in the same way that they're doing now.
Speaker 1:Charlie, that's a great point. The board doesn't always just give you $20, $50 million to go explore or really kind of innovate with AI. So not only do you have to find the budget, you also have to find use cases. Doug, I'm hoping you can walk us through kind of innovate with AI. So not only do you have to find the budget, you also have to find use cases. Doug, I'm hoping you can walk us through kind of how that prioritization and identification process went. I know you know earlier this year at the Good Good Summit which, by the way, fantastic event that Jack in the Box you know throws not only supporting, you know, restaurants, but really kind of driving strategic direction but you teased a couple of AI use cases there that you're prioritizing. So walk me through that process who you got to the table and so forth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question, brian, and I appreciate WWT's participation in that Good Good Summit. It's a great partnership we have together. Yeah, so the prioritization question you asked, and then the use case identification we do that largely through our tech committees and our leadership advisory council, which is made up of 12 franchisees Most of them are our most influential franchisees who help us think through and business case out these use cases that we want to explore. As you can imagine and, charlie, I'm sure you've seen this before yourself there's no end to the number of ideas that our teams have. We talk about two problems that we have in our business and I gather, just being around QSR quick service restaurants here, as long as I have, these are the same problems everybody faces. We have a speed problem and we have an accuracy problem, and so we sort of look at all of our solutions and ideas in the context and through the lens of how can we be faster, because after all, we are a quick service restaurant, charlie. And then accuracy, as I mentioned, nobody wants to go through a drive-through and get the food. We've all been there, we get home and then it's not made the way you want it to be made. So that's really kind of our prioritization filter in terms of sort of like our first pass, like our first pass, we also have five business outcomes that we're all aligned around that center on sales and margin and unit growth and customer guess metrics. So all those come into play. We do that through our leadership advisory council.
Speaker 2:Now you mentioned the funding part. Just between us here I know a lot of our listeners are probably going to understand what I'm saying here Our franchisees it's difficult, it's challenging, charlie, to get additional capital from them. Healthy tension between what the franchisor should fund and what the franchisee should participate in funding. So those conversations continue, especially as our funding apparatuses started off with no off-premise ordering, no AI, none of this new technology in mind. It was really just everything going on inside the four walls of a restaurant and that's kind of how our funding structures have worked for so long. And so we're challenging that, we're evolving that with our franchisees and it doesn't feel very good from their point of view. We talk about needing some additional investment to bring these technologies to bear. So it's a healthy tension field conversation. But that's how we go about that. Do you think that's the right approach based on what you've seen or what do you think?
Speaker 3:It sounds similar to so many other customers and so many other businesses. You know, doug, the interesting thing is when new technologies pop up something like AI and the funding isn't there. What we see across the board whether you're in financials, healthcare, entertainment, retail, the QSR, like yourselves so many companies don't really have a well-established model around investigation of new technologies or really understanding like innovative new technologies. So many companies kind of have to scrape together, and what we find, Doug, is different business lines, marketing IT sales. They all go test and deploy individual solutions. Typically, it runs in the cloud or SaaS, and so that starts to drive up some OPEX because it's easy. It's easy to quickly do that and kind of test and tinker with these technologies in lightweight ways.
Speaker 3:What we're seeing, though, is, though, as they try and bring those technologies in-house at scale, that conversion from that simple test, that little innovative thing that they wanted to do now, into an operational budget, is where a lot of companies are struggling today. It's, you know, I can find 50 bucks to go run a test, or 50,000 to go deploy a pilot. How do I get that into production and how do we fund that? And that's not just you, doug, with a franchisee community. It's all of these, all of the customers that we're working with right now. It's a real challenge for them, because I can't cut what I needed yesterday to add what I need tomorrow. So how do I do both?
Speaker 3:And so we spend a lot of times with executives like you, doug, really thinking through the reshuffling of the deck and rethinking prioritization. Rethinking prioritization because that's what really happens is you have to basically stack rank your priorities and then restack rank them on a continual basis around these new technologies, and it just makes it tough. It's a stressful time for executives like you and technology leadership, where the business starts demanding all of these new things. They want to test and trial and play with all these new technologies. You want to help do it in a safe and smart and scalable and secure way. It's tough to balance all of those things. So I wish I could tell you that there's a magic bullet or there's a simple nine by nine grid that solves it for everybody, but there's not. It's really around executive alignment and prioritization of business goals.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think the business goals and outcomes come first. We struggle in the same way that you just described. We don't know everything. We want to know. These are largely bets and experiments for us and everybody else.
Speaker 2:And, to your point, you know we, we struggle, we can. We can stand up a pilot pretty quickly. Uh, we've got some some good beginning AI options on voice. You know voice AI in the drive-through. Can we use a computer to take an order? Can we use Jack's voice? Can we use some of our personalities that are closely identified with the brand? Uh, to to engage our guests while our crew inside does the productivity work they need to do on making food and getting it ready. But, to your point, scaling it is one of the biggest challenges we face as well, not only financially, but operationally and technically right. We don't know all the answers to all the questions, so in so many ways, we do go into that test and learn mentality as well.
Speaker 2:I'm interested to hear your perspective. As you know so well this modernization roadmap and plan that we have in place we're trying to address. I'm trying to keep the teams focused. A large percentage of our budget and our time is on getting out of that legacy thinking and environment with technology. It's holding us back and really modernizing that tech, at the same time trying to keep an eye on the innovative tech so we don't get farther behind. I'm curious. We've talked a lot about these types of things. Just what's some wisdom there that you've learned? Talking, working with other companies? What's the right balance? How do I balance that?
Speaker 3:Wow Gosh, I was expecting easy questions from you, doug, Come on. But no, seriously, it's, it's, it is. It's a massive challenge. The, the, the, the constant rebalancing of priorities and you know, and it plays into a lot of what type of money do we have to spend also comes into play. Is it OpEx? Is it CapEx? How do we want to deal with this? Those are challenges that we're seeing on a regular basis. We're watching pretty much every customer I work with is overburdened from an OpEx perspective, and how can we convert those expenses back to more capitalized assets? That's a very, very, very common discussion and it drives different behaviors right. We watched doug.
Speaker 3:So many people shift to a cloud first, or a cloud smart strategy, yeah, and now we're watching them say, wait a minute. Have we gone too far that way? Should we bring some of these technologies back in-house? Or how do we do that? Like, you have so many restaurants where you have to have edge components for these technologies. And like, what can we put in the cloud? What can we put in the core? What can we do at the edge?
Speaker 3:You give great examples of like I would love to order some monster tacos from Jack. I think that would be awesome from an experience perspective, but you have to think about balancing that all the way out to like the tech in the store to deliver that experience with ultra low latency and the integration of that, like you said, back into point of sale. That allows for a very frictionless experience. And you still have to have humans moderating some of those transactions in the beginning, especially to make sure that the people are watching these orders. The quality is there. You mentioned it. Right. It's the perfect combination of you want quality and speed, and one without the other is a failure in either direction. You could give me the best meal ever, but if it takes an hour, that doesn't help me.
Speaker 3:That doesn't help me. Yeah, you could give me a horrible meal in a second, and that doesn't help me either. So I think you, like so many others, are going through this education process and re-education with your executives Because, as you know, doug, ai has become a board-level discussion for pretty much everybody across all the threads and I think the constant reshuffling, getting executives to understand how much this technology can impact your employee or your guest experiences, and helping them understand how to do these things safely and smartly, the amount of time that technology teams are having to educate their business counterparts is tremendous and executives are having to educate their business. You know, counterparts is tremendous and executives are having to learn more and more things about technology than they've ever had to do before. Right, they, they went to business school to run a business. They they didn't all go to technology school to understand the technology of running a business, but but now those things are emerging, they're becoming the same.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, well, that's great. That's great. I mean my job. Every day, I feel like Charlie. 90% of my job is influencing and bringing people along and educating, informing.
Speaker 2:Now I've learned something new. Now I've got to reshape what I've already shared in the past and sharing this overall narrative and transformation roadmap when I don't have all the answers vulnerably and honestly, I don't have all the answers, but I'm looked to have all those answers. So it's exciting and thrilling and we're trying to embrace AI in the midst of an environment that is old and outdated and I'm sure not to feel sorry for myself, but I'm sure many, many organizations out there are caught and have been caught between how do I keep moving the business forward and keep pace with the speed of the technology and of how things? You got to pivot in a moment these days, you got to blunch your competition. You got to deal with those things that you know you gotta. You gotta pivot in a moment these days, yeah, you gotta. You gotta blunch your competition. You gotta deal with those things that are coming at you all the time.
Speaker 3:And it's. It's also tough because you talk about fundamentals and the foundational aspects of these technologies. You've got to go back and revisit your data platforms, your data strategy. What your data strategy and the architecture around your data was of two years ago may not be what's needed to make some of these new technologies perform the way you would like to, and so you're constantly having to retouch work that you think you just finished a massive data project and then you go wait a minute, that was kind of pre-AI. Now that I've got AI in the middle of all of this, do I have it set up the right way? Is it going to drive the right results for some of these AI solutions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we've touched every part of our technology ecosystem. We've had to pull out and replace and modernize, do and redo every part of our technology, from ERP systems to PLS platforms, to back a house systems in the restaurant, to our digital tech stack and data. It's always under construction and as part of that, you're trying to explain to folks who don't understand all the facets of that why we're constantly under construction and why we ongoing stream of investment and funding, because if we don't do it, obviously our competition is going to do it, and so, um, it's. It may be one of the more complicated times ever for, for, for people like yourself and myself, and you know folks that lead technology, uh, you know, uh, departments and businesses, because it's, uh, the ideas. It's really all about how faster technology can respond to those new ideas and pivot. So again, I'm excited, I'm thrilled about it, but, man, it keeps me up at night, every night, it seems like yeah, charlie.
Speaker 1:I mean. So much is up in the air, whether it's you're on the right path for a use case, or you're talking about funding or prioritization. The list goes on and on. Given all that uncertainty, charlie, are there any like signals or momentum points that that we should be looking out for to know or feel confident that we're on the right path towards accelerating and getting closer to that AI flywheel?
Speaker 3:It goes back to the basics, brian, of just start small Test pilot play with technologies but get one or two right, get some wins, get some successes around those pilots, those new technologies, new innovations, because you got to bring the rest of the business, the stakeholders, along for the ride. So you've got to show small but quick wins frequently to drive that continual mindset and investment in these technologies. I think that's the key. What I've noticed, brian and Doug please I want your thoughts on this too the days of the year-long project, before you start to see a return, people used to talk about oh, can I get a return in the first year?
Speaker 3:It's changing the pace of funding, the pace of expectations around value. It's a quarterly of funding, the pace of expectations around value. It's a quarterly, it's, it's, it's what can I see this month or this quarter to to impact both, you know, my guests, my employees, but possibly even my stock, and so we're seeing a lot more. You know, what can we do in six weeks or eight weeks so that I can start to see a result by that 10th or 12th week? Not, let's do a 25 week or, heck, a 52 week project. It's, it's break it up into smaller, more digestible chunks. That allows me to show value faster. And, doug, my guess is you're? You're in a similar, a similar challenge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent, charlie. Yeah, the days are over. Use your words that that you can just go off in a corner, and we can't do it in IT alone. You said that. I think that might be the harder part of all of this is, everybody has to come along on the journey. Everybody has to be at the table that are helping our organizations. We have to be bringing those people to the table. We have to have them there.
Speaker 2:I've got so many examples where IT has run off and done what is the right thing and had the wrong people, or not the right people at the table, and then it's a failure. It's always a failure and it's been IT-led as opposed to business led. So, to your point, the small POCs and the small pilots that show proof of value. And then I have learned having really strong architects and tech leads on the team that are helping us think about if this wins, if this bet pays off, how are we going to scale this Right? How is the technology going to evolve so we can quickly go from zero to 60?
Speaker 2:Because, charlie, I'm guessing that you see the same thing, but in our world it's that worked. Go faster, roll it all the way out or roll to lots of markets. And oftentimes we get tripped up there because we maybe took some shortcuts early on, even in the pilot of the POC. We get tripped up there because we maybe took some shortcuts early on, even in the pilot of the POC. So it's, it's really that it's like a razor's edge. It's really a tight rope between doing that pilot, quickly showing value, and then being able to, to, to, to, to scale it, uh, you know, quickly, so uh, but you said it, that's, that's right, it's, it's, it's the basics of how you uh, quickly show value and then, if you need to pivot, because it's not working.
Speaker 3:You go on to the next idea and, doug, I also think on the back end of that well, not on the back end, but on top of all of that communication really good project management, no-transcript, and so just these more complex engagements with all of these stakeholders, all of these different people that need to be part of the process just a doubling down on really good project management has been important as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah it has. We just did a project and we're getting closer to the end of it, which you might call one of the biggest projects that Jack in the Box has ever taken on. And for those out there that have done big ERP projects, or, in our case, an ERP at the restaurant which is replacing our point of sale system, this is the heart of a restaurant. Everything runs through there. Without that functioning properly, you have no business. We've done a bunch of work together on that WWT and Jack in the Box. We've done a bunch of work together on that WWT and Jack in the Box and we've had a tremendous project and program management, largely from WWT helping to shepherd this thing through. And it shows the value. As I sit back and watch over what really is a short time horizon and now 12 months, we've rolled out hundreds, now thousands, of locations with a new POS system and I sleep pretty good at night. We feel really good about this program because it's on cruise control Now.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of work going on. There's installations, there's procurement of hardware, there's software configuration. But, like you said, one of the most critical roles, maybe the most important role, is that quarterback, that program project manager and all of us that have been in IT know yeah, project manager, project manager. But when you're taking on an initiative that's transformative in nature, like what we're doing together, that role is, I mean, just paramount. And getting that right like we have it just heightens, it increases your chances and probability of success, which I'm happy about for sure, because I don't get that right, franchisees are calling me every minute of the day and that's just, that's no good, and our business is in a rough spot too. So, whether it's an AI project or a modernization project or anything of scale, you said it 100% program project management, somebody that can communicate effectively, absolutely critical.
Speaker 1:I love the cruise control. I'll go ahead and knock on wood for you right now with that statement, but I am interested in the franchisee angle because that seems like such a tall task, a boulder up a hill in terms of. You know, it's one thing to prove out an AI solution or anything for that matter, but you know how do you start to scale it across a franchisee community that might be fragmented or might be just boots on the ground trying to make things run day to day Doug. How do you go about doing that, knowing that that's a pretty applicable situation for many other industries that might be tuning in today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I wish I had the perfect algorithm for how to do that. We've been successful in several initiatives here at Jack and the Box, one that I just mentioned here that I mean it affects every single restaurant and every single franchisee and every single employee in our workforce. I think number one is we already mentioned it, brian the program and project management and really the governance structures. That word governance oftentimes gets a bad rap governance we're going to govern something but at the end of the day, without a framework and a well-thought-out approach, which we did. And I'll give our teams credit, and I'll say to those that are listening here don't underestimate that Our teams early on came to me, brian and Charlie knows this, and our WWT friends know this as well. Hey, you know, our three guys can do this. Let us at it. Coach, you know, um, and I appreciate the zeal and I appreciate the desire to say that we can run a program of this size, but, um, they really didn't know what we were, what we're getting into here. We really needed a level of sophistication and maturity, uh, to take on this initiative, much less anything of this size. And then, along the way, we absolutely needed a constant communication and interaction mechanism with our franchisees. Charlie can attest to this and again, the teams can.
Speaker 2:This thing didn't get off to the most rosy start, like most projects, don't? You've got to work through those hard early on challenges, brian and Charlie. You know this, charlie, that establishes trust, establishes credibility, establishes excellence and quality. And listen, I'm coming in with new technology, but we're not going to disrupt your business. We're not going to put you in a position where your employees can't take care of the guest or you're losing money. We had to overcome that together as a team and there really isn't any recipe that I can think of right now. That's just like a surefire thing for that. For me personally, it's really gathering around me and our team trusted senior level thinkers and thought leadership and partnership people that are all in kind of people and I'm thinking of those people right now, charlie, that you know of that said hey, this is going to be tough, this is not going to be easy, we all know it. But we're here for said hey, this is going to be tough, this is not going to be easy, we all know it. But we're here for the long haul and we're going to battle through together to make this successful, and that's why I say the cruise control now, brian, because nothing's on cruise control. There's always choppy air ahead, so to speak. But when you hit that choppy air at thousands of locations in, it's because you work through that ascent to get to cruise control way back at 10 and 50 and 100 restaurants in our case.
Speaker 2:For this project and, I think, an AI project anything of scale goes through that life cycle and everybody needs to be ready for it. I was ready for it but wasn't ready for it. I've been through several of these myself, but you got to have an army, a village of people that you trust in your inner circle, that are working on your behalf and have the experiences and the reps of doing this and have resilience. They're going to persevere through challenges, which we all did, and our franchisees were questionable about this early on. Do you have what you need done? Really, are you going to make? Don't mess this up, don't cost me sales, and early on we stubbed our toe.
Speaker 2:But I would tell you I couldn't be more proud of an initiative in my career than this one. I would tell you I couldn't be more proud of an initiative in my career than this one because of the complexity of it, charlie, you know you've been in it with us since the get-go. This is something I would tell anybody else. We got a blueprint here and we're going to keep kind of rinsing and repeating it, but it's something that's worth sharing with those out there listening. Notice, I didn't say anything, charlie, about technology. I didn't say anything about technology at all because that's the easy part.
Speaker 3:It's funny, doug, that, whether it's AI or a massive point-of-sale deployment or so many other things, and it's about understanding and managing the process around transformation, that's really what it is. It's that organizational change, it's that alignment with all the stakeholders. It's so many of the things that we've talked about. It's a constant communication and collaboration with all the different stakeholders involved. There's some really cool stuff that's either here or coming very soon around robotics and other things. I know that you're even testing some of those things, doug, in your stores, but to me, ai is just the next concentric circle of transformation business transformation, digital transformation, whatever you want to call it. It really is just the next level of automation around these things. So, as I look at it, what I understand at the core of Jack is is you've helped them better understand and execute transformation at a at a large scale, with lots of constituents, and and your leadership team has really had to push and drive through that and build trust with the communities and the teams and the and the people all while you use the analogy right Keeping the plane in the air and keeping the engines humming, and you're trying to do all of this change without impacting the speed or the quality of that order to the guest, and there's just not a lot of room in there for failure.
Speaker 3:Your stores operate many of them just there's just not a lot of room in there for failure. Your stores operate many of them 24 seven. It's not like you're bringing stores down on a regular basis to do this right. A lot of restaurants, a lot of retailers don't have that 24 seven model. I'm the first one to tell you I joke with you all the time A lot of my monster tacos are after nine o'clock on the way home from an awesome sporting event, or grabbing something for my kids after soccer or whatever. Right, I mean, you guys operate that 24 hour model and so that gives you very little tolerance for when you can bring things down and and and it's, it's just, it's just complex, it's, it's, it's tough, but it's. It can be fun too at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, Brian, if we hit on the hit on the heart of the matter of the question there, brian, but you, hopefully you could see there. It's really what you said, charlie. I think that's what makes any good initiative, and especially any transformation or transformation oriented initiative, be successful is all the things that go on outside the technology, because the technology is native to us. We know how to build technology. We can do that. It's everybody and everything around it that you got to set up for the best chance for success.
Speaker 1:Hey Charlie, thinking about everything we've talked about here today and the work that we've done with Jack in the Box to date, beyond, you know, just kind of navigating the transformation journey, what lessons can be learned from the way Jack in the Box and Doug have done all of this that will help other technology leaders or business leaders for that matter, navigate their AI journeys.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, a lot of lessons learned with any of these big transformation initiatives. You know one just open, honest, transparent communication with, as Doug said, where things are, where things should be, what's working, what's not. You can work together as a team if everybody's communicating and collaborating well. So that open, honest communication with upwards to the executives and all the way throughout the rest of the organization is huge. I think that's a big part of it.
Speaker 3:I think Doug also touched on the planning and the prep, like the amount of time that, even if you think you're ready, you're still almost ready.
Speaker 3:It's like the old joke of you can be more ready to have kids but you're never ready to have kids.
Speaker 3:It's kind of the same thing with these transformational initiatives you think you're ready, you're almost there, but there are always things where you're just you just don't know.
Speaker 3:So, having the right team communicating and collaborating, and then you know, knowing that there are going to be hurdles, there are going to be stumbling areas throughout these projects, and how do you, both with your own teams and with your partners, how do you course correct? Like? To me, that's always the sign of a good partnership, whether it's your internal teams partnering or partnering with external companies like us. It's not pretending that there won't be issues, it's how do you resolve those issues, how do you work through those issues and how do companies come out of that stronger on the other side, in partnership either with their own teams or with business partners like us. And I think, brian, that's the key on these big initiatives is just that open, honest communication, collaboration, trying to plan as best as you can, but being smart enough to know that you can't plan at all and you're going to have to figure out some of it on the fly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll build on that, brian. I Charlie's spot on on all all those comments. One thing that I've had to do conscientiously is we've had to do some talent development. We really have a transformation of the size of which so many companies are undertaking, including Jack in the Box, requires modern engineering and product and engineering thinking. We didn't have a product organization, charlie, or really any engineering capability, so to take on the digital goals and objectives of the business, we had to step back and say, well, what we have in technology right now, it's just not good enough full stop, and so we need a new level of thinking, and we can get that from partners like WWT and we have on data and on digital and a POS. But we had to own this. We got to operate this long-term, and so we got to have capable, competent staff internally, and so we built a greater capacity is my point, and so I would tell everybody out there doing a transformation, don't underestimate that. But at the heart of it, charlie's just like hit the bullseye there. You know the communication, starting with people like myself hey guys, let's.
Speaker 2:This transformation is going to be hard, it's going to be messy. We're going to want to quit on it. We're going to want to turn back. It's worth it in the end. Stick in there and stay in there, because if we don't, then we won't have a business likely, because there are people out there working harder than we are and are pushing harder than we are, and we not only have to catch up, we have to, we have to again sort of surpass and leapfrog to be a leader. And so that's not been Jack in the box thinking, in my estimation, in years gone by, and that's not an insult on the on any previous regimes, but this growth strategy and transformation thinking is really relatively recent for Jack and sort of been caught in our heels a little bit. And so to step forward, we got to double down, we really got to move much faster. And so with that, as Charlie said, there's going to be mistakes. So we talked to our board, we talked to our executive team. Things aren't going to be rosy. We're going to break some glass, we're going to cause some challenges, but just know that scale touches every part of our business. It affects HR, it affects supply chain, it obviously affects marketing, ops and technology SaaS contracts.
Speaker 2:Now it's like you said, it's we're operating in the cloud. It's a totally different thing. Our finance and accounting teams are like well, how do I, how do we, how do we capitalize this? Can we even capitalize this? Do we need to look at our yeah?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've had conversations in the last well, since this transformation began, and like we've moved to cloud, just like you talked about earlier, and we also have.
Speaker 2:And we've moved to cloud, just like you talked about earlier, and we also have, of course, increased staffing, both externally and internally, and we want to stretch that dollar, we want to maximize the use of our funds. And so the question, so to speak, so we can capitalize the integration work, but the licensing for the SaaS product, we can't when before we'd bring that in, stick it as an asset on our books and deploy it locally. And, like all those conversations, we've had to revise our CapEx guidelines, charlie, and not only once. We've done it two or three times with our audit partners, because we're trying to literally stay like with a straight face in the lane but maximize the use of our funds as well so we can get the you know the again the maximum output as part of that. So like it has rocked every part of our organization and it's been my experience in multiple transformations. This happens, so get ready, for it is my point.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, that's a great time, or you know? Fantastic insights to the both of you. Thank you so much for sharing time. I know we're up on the top of the hour here. As it happens, here in St Louis is lunchtime. Charlie, you've name dropped Monster Tacos enough times that I think I might drive over and get some on my way home. Doug, thank you so much for joining and, charlie, as always, thanks for having you. Awesome stuff.
Speaker 3:Always great, doug. Thank you for the time man. I love catching up with you, and we've still got a lot of work ahead, so let's just keep moving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, likewise Charlie. You're the best. Thank you, Brian, Appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Okay, before we wrap, here are three quick lessons Doug and Charlie leave on the table. First, stabilize before you strategize. If your systems can't take an order or swipe a card reliably, every AI idea is just theater. Think about how that applies to your business. Second, speed and accuracy are the gatekeepers. You can pilot anything you want, but it only graduates if it accelerates processes or provides more actionable insights. And third, transformation is a team sport. Transparent comms, ironclad program management and rock-solid franchisee trust beat flashy tech. Every time, the bottom line is nail the fundamentals, prove value fast and keep every stakeholder in the loop. Then AI stops being hype and starts serving real meals at scale. If you liked this episode of the AI Proving Ground podcast, please consider rating us or leaving us a review on whichever platform you're listening, and you can always find more episodes and other great video content on wwwaicom. This episode was co-produced by Naz Baker, cara Kuhn, mallory Schaffran and Marissa Reed. Our audio and video engineer is John Knobloch. My name is Brian Felt. See you next time.
