This article was originally published on Franchise Times, a sister publication to Food On Demand.
Artificial intelligence isn’t going away anytime soon. Industry executives see untapped potential in that promise—especially when it comes to restaurant marketing.
“What we see over and over again is that the leaders that are adapting fast and learning quickly are the ones that are winning,” said Dylan Bolden, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group.
Bolden spoke alongside Boston Consulting Group colleagues Mary Martin and Jon Roberts during a panel on generative AI’s impact on the restaurant industry at this year’s Restaurant Finance & Development Conference November 11 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
The industry has experienced “meaningful shifts in consumer behavior,” said Roberts, a managing director and partner with the consulting firm. While some are challenges—cautious spending, less traffic, rising customer acquisition costs and struggling retention rates—technology-driven shifts are changing how consumers and brands interact with one another and can be used to respond to existing headwinds.
“From a marketing perspective, you’ve got less spend and less budget to be able to drive growth,” Roberts said as a result, begging the question: How can you do more with less?
Executives believe AI could be the answer.
Roberts said consumers are using AI tools like ChatGPT, averaging 800 million weekly active users as of last month, in their purchase journey, whether it’s doing product research or asking for recommendations based off food and cost preferences.
Mary Martin, a managing director and senior partner with Boston Consulting Group, spoke about generative AI’s impact on the restaurant industry. Martin spoke alongside Boston Consulting Group colleagues Jon Roberts and Dylan Bolden.
AI has also been integrated into marketing campaigns from start to finish: analyzing trends via consumer and market research, leading customer segmentation, generating new content, personalizing marketing to target audiences and measuring performance results.
As a result, Boston Consulting said AI has the potential to reduce campaign insight and strategy process time by about 40 percent.
Martin, a managing director and senior partner, sees it as an end-to-end transformation in the world of marketing.
And with content creation, janky videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti are a thing of the past as generative AI continues to refine itself.
Last month, Asian fast-casual concept Teriyaki Madness made news by partnering with AI studio Genre.ai to launch a fully AI-generated ad campaign. From the actors and environments to the voiceovers and visual effects, every element was created through AI, which the company said dramatically reduced production costs and turnaround times.
Based off cost-effectiveness and other trade-offs, Bolden doesn’t think AI marketing content will be novel for long.
“When you get to video, I think that’s where brand managers are very reticent at this point. They don’t want to be the first to do it … because they don’t want to be shamed on social media,” he said. “But I think it’s just a matter of time.”
Despite a significant shift, end-to-end AI content won’t—and shouldn’t—replace the human touch of marketing. “It’s not so binary: generative or real,” Martin said. “Right now, what we’re seeing is most brands play in that hybrid.”
She said restaurant concepts and agencies should instead focus on upskilling staff to understand and master AI strategies and tools, especially as more applications and companies are brought into the fold.
Restaurant brands are thus encouraged to rethink operations and cross-functional collaboration from the ground up, all with the hopes of driving robust success in this newest iteration of marketing.
“I think it’s pretty powerful to think about, and it’s moving quickly,” Roberts said. “There is a lot of value to continue to get after.”
The Restaurant Finance & Development Conference, presented by the Restaurant Finance Monitor, Franchise Times and Food On Demand, wrapped up on November 12 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
