Your AI Thinks You’re a Farmer: Patrick Bobrukiewicz on Teaching AI to Speak Restaurant
Restaurant AIShow Notes
How many franchise groups have a VP of AI? Patrick Bobrukiewicz might be one of one.
Patrick is VP of AI Strategy and Innovation at Thrive Restaurant Group, the Wichita based operator behind 200 plus restaurants across 18 states, including one of the largest Applebee's franchise groups in the country. He started as a line cook, spent two decades in restaurant tech, and now builds the data brain that turns POS, P&L, and labor data into decisions operators actually use.
Matt and Patrick get into why restaurants spent 30 years handing control of their data to vendors and how Thrive is taking it back, pulling 60 disparate systems into one place. Patrick explains the document called Growing Cilantro that has nothing to do with farming, why AI fails on your language before it ever fails on your data, and the P&L fix that cost about five dollars in code and bought back ten hours every period.
They also cover the Applebee's CEO speech about a cash register that reframed restaurant IT forever, why great tools should fit operators like a fighter jet fits a pilot, what a 24 year old proved by building his own ticketing system, and the snowstorm call that shows where all of this is heading.
Show notes and timestamps: clearcogs.com/podcast
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