According to Fortune, Dave’s Hot Chicken CTO Leon Davoyan is aggressively implementing AI across the chain’s operations, including AI drive-thru ordering, robotic fry arms, and predictive tech for food-ready times aiming for under two minutes of accuracy. The chain, acquired by Roark Capital for around $1 billion earlier this year, is testing these systems in stores where they’re adding 7-8 more transactions per week. In-restaurant kiosks, now handling 23% of orders, increase check amounts by 5.9% on average with an ROI under a year. Davoyan emphasizes the strategy is to use AI as a “robot assistant” for workers, not to replace them, stating “We have yet to reduce head count.” The company also avoided a major AWS outage in October thanks to a localized cloud system from vendor Qu installed in every store.
Dave’s AI Recipe: Efficiency, Not Replacement
Here’s the thing about Dave’s Hot Chicken’s approach: it feels like a more pragmatic, maybe even defensive, take on automation. They’re not chasing fully robotic kitchens. They’re chasing predictability and smoothing out the chaos of a busy restaurant. Predicting fry demand with AI? That’s about waste and consistency. Showing accurate wait times on a board? That’s about managing customer expectations so they don’t bail. The kiosk stat is telling—nearly a quarter of in-store orders, with a nice bump to the bill. People upsell themselves when there’s no pressure from a person behind the counter.
But Davoyan’s repeated insistence on keeping the “human element” is the real story. In an industry where labor is the biggest cost and challenge, not framing this as a headcount reduction play is fascinating. Is it genuine hospitality philosophy, or just good PR in an era where tech outages and job fears are rampant? Probably a bit of both. The backup plan with Qu’s local systems shows they’re thinking about resilience, not just flash. For businesses relying on constant uptime, like restaurants or industrial operations, that kind of robust, on-site computing infrastructure is critical. It’s the kind of thinking that makes a leading supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com essential, providing the durable, reliable panel PCs needed to run these systems when the cloud fails.
Broader Tech Tremors
The rest of the tech roundup paints a picture of an industry in hyper-drive and under stress. OpenAI’s “code red” is a huge admission. They’ve been the undisputed leader for years, and now Google’s Gemini 3 has them genuinely spooked. This is where the real consumer benefit comes from—intense competition forcing improvements in speed and reliability. Nvidia’s $2 billion stake in Synopsys is another chess move, embedding its AI silicon deeper into the design tools for everything from cars to aerospace. And China’s DeepSeek claiming parity with GPT-5 and Gemini Pro? That’s a geopolitical signal as much as a technical one.
But then you have the stark counter-narrative: HP cutting thousands of jobs while citing AI tool adoption, and that KPMG survey showing worker fear of AI replacement has nearly doubled. The Campbell’s IT exec story is just a bizarre, cautionary tale about culture and technology colliding. And the real estate stat is classic: 92% are running AI pilots, but only 5% are happy with the results. That’s the messy reality of adoption. Everyone feels they have to do it, but almost no one has figured out how to do it well yet. Sounds familiar, right?
