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AI First with Adam and Andy: Inspiring Business Leaders to Make AI First Moves is a dynamic podcast focused on the unprecedented potential of AI and how business leaders can harness it to transform their companies. Each episode dives into real-world examples of AI deployments, the "holy shit" moments where AI changes everything, and the steps leaders need to take to stay ahead. It’s bold, actionable, and emphasizes the exponential acceleration of AI, inspiring CEOs to make AI-first moves before they fall behind.
Zach Goldstein (00:00)
DoorDash and Uber are ubiquitous. You must be on a third party marketplace if you're a restaurant.
Andy Sack (00:09)
. .
Zach Goldstein (00:05)
How you participate is where things are changing. And that's a moving landscape as well. Uber and DoorDash built a billion dollar ad business each over the course of about a year in the last couple of years. And now if you're not paying for ads, your revenue even on those marketplaces is at risk.
And so it's a really challenging landscape and it's for all those reasons that we think it's more critical than ever for restaurants to own their guest relationships, not at the exclusion of third
party, but in many ways to protect themselves from becoming over dependent on third
Andy Sack (00:40)
This is AI First with Adam and Andy, the show that takes you straight to the front lines of AI innovation in business. I'm Andy Sack and alongside my co-host, Adam Brotman, each episode we bring you candid conversations with business leaders transforming their businesses with AI. No fluff, just real talk, actionable use case, and insights for you.
Welcome back everyone. Really excited for today's episode. We're trying something a little bit different. We're taking advantage. I think most of the audience knows we're going to take advantage of my fellow co-host and business partner and dear friend Adam Brotman's professional expertise and domain knowledge in loyalty and loyalty and AI. And we actually also have a guest who has similar domain knowledge in
Zach Goldstein (01:17)
you
Andy Sack (01:38)
loyalty and AI and both have a lot of experience with restaurants in particular. We're going to be trying to do this on the podcast more frequently with our guest episodes. And ⁓ as we increasingly get more business from the restaurant and retail industry, we're trying to bring three things that we really want you to get out of this. One is a clear way of how to think about AI first and loyalty. Number two is a
concrete mental model for AI intermediating the relationship without hand waving like real world experience. And then three to five practical moves that restaurant leaders could take this quarter. So with that, allow me to introduce our guest, Zach Goldstein. Welcome, Zach.
Zach Goldstein (02:11)
Thank
Thanx Andy, pleasure to be here.
Andy Sack (02:28)
Welcome, Adam. Good to see you.
Adam Brotman (02:29)
Hey,
what's up, buddy?
Andy Sack (02:31)
So Zach, you've recently become a friend of the firm. I know you've already spoken to Adam, but for those of our audience members that don't know you, why don't you introduce yourself first and then briefly tell us what your company Thanx is.
Zach Goldstein (02:47)
Yeah, Zach Goldstein, founder and CEO of Thanx. Thanx is a complete guest engagement platform for the restaurant industry. Our goal is to drive loyalty as a business outcome, not just deliver programs. We think of loyalty as a business outcome is driving repeat traffic profitably back to the restaurant and direct ownership of all of the guest relationship. And this is a massive challenge industry-wide as restaurants are
one of the most competitive categories that exists and continuing to deal with the rapid digitization post-COVID and the disaggregation from their customers from third-party marketplaces. So lots more to talk about, but loyalty is more important than ever.
Andy Sack (03:27)
And Zach, I mean, think you said it, you almost said it so fast and so succinctly that if you repeat it, it's okay. What problem are you solving for restaurants specifically?
Zach Goldstein (03:39)
traffic, I'll be even more succinct. We believe that restaurants need, yes, and ultimately there are two ways to drive traffic, new guests and repeat guests. We are focused on both, but disproportionately it is easier and more cost effective for restaurants to drive customers they already know back in the door or back to their digital channels. And that is our goal.
Andy Sack (03:41)
traffic. Repeat, repeat traffic.
What is loyalty actually about at its core?
Zach Goldstein (04:08)
So to me, yeah, so to me, that's why I say loyalty is a business outcome. To me, loyalty is creating a relationship that makes it possible and in fact attractive for a guest of the business to repeat their purchasing over and over again. And in food, the reality is your dining occasions are every single day. But where people eat and how they eat changes
Andy Sack (04:08)
I mean, besides traffic.
Zach Goldstein (04:35)
quite significantly from hour to hour and day to day. And so for a restaurant to stay top of mind, to have the right relationship with a guest, loyalty starts well beyond the program, the quote unquote marketing program. Loyalty to me is about convenience. It's about quality and ⁓ distinctiveness of the experience. But ultimately it's about the ease of purchasing.
Andy Sack (04:45)
you .
Zach Goldstein (04:58)
the personal relationship that I get with that brand both when I'm there and when I'm hearing from them and I'm not there. All of those are drivers in loyalty that all boils down to does the person want to and actually succeeded coming back
and spending money again in the future.
Andy Sack (05:13)
Let's bring in my fellow co-host, Adam, loyalty expert. Where do you want to ask a question? You want to chime in? Let's get you in here.
Adam Brotman (05:24)
Well, let's orient our listeners also to just talking about specifically what Thanx does.
so, Zach, can you tell everyone a little bit about Thanx? if I'm running a chain restaurant brand, where does Thanx come in? As a customer, where would I run up against it? Talk about your specific.
product and capability set.
Zach Goldstein (05:46)
Yep,
we have four elements of our platform. The first is the first party digital ordering experience for a restaurant. So if you download the restaurant's app or if you go to their website and order directly from the restaurant, that's an experience that's being powered and run by Thanx And it's optimized to build a direct relationship with that consumer, unlike a third party marketplace where that consumer may order food from that restaurant, but their identity is not known and they don't have a direct relationship with the restaurant.
That's mission critical for restaurants to succeed in this digital era. So app web ordering experiences, number one. ⁓
Andy Sack (06:19)
.
Zach Goldstein (06:21)
Number two, the core loyalty program. So the actual exchange of value of why, what a customer gets from going to a first party channel. ⁓ And that can be wide ranging from ⁓ points and discounts to, you know, access to secret menus and experiences. Loyalty can be much broader than just a, you know, rote discount value exchange.
Andy Sack (06:24)
you you
Zach Goldstein (06:43)
But the underlying CRM of who are those guests so that you actually can build relationships and engage with them personally.
Andy Sack (06:53)
.
Zach Goldstein (06:50)
And then the third piece is what we consider marketing automation, which is how do you act on all of that data to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time with the goal of staying top of mind and ultimately driving repeat purchasing. And so those three products really are one plus one plus one equals five, six, seven. They're multiplicative.
Adam Brotman (07:03)
Yep.
Zach Goldstein (07:10)
because if you know who your guests are and you can keep your guests on your first party channels and you can send them a message based on everything
you know about them, the consumer wins, the restaurant wins, and that becomes a virtuous cycle.
Adam Brotman (07:24)
Yeah, great. I mean, and Andy at the risk of accelerating the agenda of this podcast, I'd love to just kind of push into talking about. Like, I mean, so I mean, just to dive right in, I mean, that kind of orients everybody. So you've got in the restaurant space, Zach is a real leader, restaurant tech and customer engagement space. I remember, you know, I want to say going back.
Andy Sack (07:34)
No, dude, slow down, slow down.
Adam Brotman (07:52)
probably five years ago when I got to meet Zach. was, know, Thanx was, had already been started, but was well on its way to becoming the successful firm it is now. I hadn't talked to Zach in a couple of years and it was fun to reconnect with Zach the other day. And I remember Zach, you mentioned third party aggregators and I think you and I have a similar, I don't want to say.
negative view of them. like we, you know, we're both very positive, let's put it this way, on the need to have direct relationship with the customer and digitally and the data that comes from it the ability to produce a better experience for the customer that's more personalized, that does ultimately drive that traffic. And, you know, when a customer of a restaurant uses a third party marketplace, instead of the first party platform,
there's a there's a loss of data and engagement opportunities and things like that. I think you and I are the same mind. I will tell you, Zach, when you and I were talking, getting to know each other four or five years ago, the door dashes and Uber eats and grubhubs of the world were relatively new. mean, they they weren't brand new, but they were still there. They were coming on. They're coming on strong because of covid. They kind of took on a special role. I
Andy Sack (09:01)
Okay. you
Adam Brotman (09:05)
I will tell you, and I'd to get your comment on this before we get into AI stuff, I'm shocked at how big of a industry they've become. Not because I was rooting against them
or because I'm whatever. I've done some homework recently, trying to figure out how many unique customers in the United States actually order at least once a week from one those platforms. the numbers are astounding.
And so I would love to, I mean, there are like 70 million unique people a month are using across those platforms, it's really conundrum, right? If you're a restaurant brand, I want to get Zach to comment on this. If you're a restaurant brand, for a lot of reasons, you'd prefer not to. mean, all things being equal for sure, you don't want to pay the fees.
Andy Sack (09:33)
What are they, Adam?
Adam Brotman (09:54)
You want the data, you want the direct relationship with the customer, and yet you can't ignore those platforms because it's like ignoring a third of the market in a way. So Zach, tell me your thoughts, on how that has evolved and what that means for restaurant brands?
Zach Goldstein (09:56)
Thank
Yep. I think it is the most transformational disruption restaurants have ever seen. And they are still trying to figure out what that means. I started writing about this in 2019. I wrote an article called The Four Horsemen of the Restaurant Apocalypse. horsemen at the time. There are now two. Grubhub's trying to come back with their Super Bowl ad, so maybe there are three.
Andy Sack (10:16)
.
Adam Brotman (10:30)
Yes.
Zach Goldstein (10:38)
The, you know, that was over exaggerating the threat, but the reason that we knew this change was coming is we've seen it in other industries,
⁓ online travel agencies and how they impacted hotels being probably the best example. and what did hotels do hotels decided to build strong first party digital platforms. Booked direct campaigns became dominant and strong loyalty programs. used to be, if you booked on Expedia.
Andy Sack (10:57)
Okay. Okay.
Zach Goldstein (11:06)
and you were a member of the Marriott loyalty program, you got your points, you got your upgrade if you had status, no big deal. We don't care where the booking comes from. You book on Expedia today, you get no points, you're in the basement, you book direct, you get the free room upgrade if it's available. There's been a real bifurcation in what you get as a consumer for going direct. And that's very purposeful because that disaggregation was so problematic for hotels. I think we're seeing in our business, certainly, you I was writing that in 2019,
Andy Sack (11:21)
. you
Zach Goldstein (11:36)
But the truth of the matter is in 2019, loyalty programs were considered nice to have by many restaurants. And that was challenging in our business in many ways. Loyalty
programs are not nice to have anymore. Restaurants solve the customer data problem basically one of two ways. One, reservations and wait lists, which is a small portion of the overall restaurant industry, can capture a large enough CRM through reservations, think white table cloth type businesses.
For the rest, they have anonymous customers walking into their restaurants constantly, and the way they solve that problem is with loyalty. And when you combine loyalty with the rapid digitization of restaurant dining occasions and the off-premise dining, you end up getting a chance for loyalty programs not to be a small portion of the overall customer base, but actually a really significant portion. Some of our customers are capturing 60%, 70 % of their revenue through their loyalty program.
That was unheard of back in the day. mean, Adam built at Starbucks, a number that no one could even touch. And it was probably 40, 45 at the time. Right. And so like, and no one was even close. Right. It was like they were, they were double or beyond where everyone was. So things have changed in that dimension. What's challenging for third party thinking about third party though, is there was maybe a chance where restaurants could quote unquote, push back or fight back the way the hotels.
Andy Sack (12:38)
you .
Adam Brotman (12:39)
That's right.
Yeah.
Zach Goldstein (12:59)
But you pointed this out, Adam, they're ubiquitous now.
DoorDash and Uber are ubiquitous. You must be on a third party marketplace if you're a restaurant.
Andy Sack (13:11)
. .
Zach Goldstein (13:07)
How you participate is where things are changing. And that's a moving landscape as well. Uber and DoorDash built a billion dollar ad business each over the course of about a year in the last couple of years. And now if you're not paying for ads, your revenue even on those marketplaces is at risk.
And so it's a really challenging landscape and it's for all those reasons that we think it's more critical than ever for restaurants to own their guest relationships, not at the exclusion of third
party, but in many ways to protect themselves from becoming over dependent on third
Adam Brotman (13:42)
And are the, this is maybe a naive question, because you live it every day. I used to live it every day like you do. I live it 20 % of every one of my days now, but not 100 % like you. I love your example about Marriott and Expedia. Bring that back to
Andy Sack (13:42)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (13:56)
the restaurant business.
Like, do DoorDash and UberEats, would they ever partner with a Thanx? was there ever an opportunity to say, can still get that data somehow if you're using the Thanx platform, but you want to like, order on UberEats or DoorDash, it goes right into their POS system and everything. So.
what's your thoughts on where this goes in terms of does it come together where they become a POS system that a Thanx could ever partner with? it going to be hard for that to happen?
Zach Goldstein (14:33)
Both is, think, the answer, actually. The biggest brands have different relationships with a DoorDash or an Uber than the average restaurant.
Andy Sack (14:42)
So can you give me an example, Zach, of what you're talking about?
Zach Goldstein (14:46)
Yeah, so DoorDash, for instance, has a direct relationship with McDonald's, where if you go to the McDonald's website and you order delivery directly through McDonald's, you're actually placing that order through a DoorDash-powered experience. while it's not publicly known, ⁓ it is understood that McDonald's has excellent economics on that, making that worthwhile, and excellent data sharing, making that worthwhile in a way that most restaurants simply can't.
And so the orders that are placed on marketplaces, that data is not shared back with restaurants in most cases. You you asked the question, Adam, could that change? I think DoorDash is one of the most impressive executing companies in any industry, let alone restaurant technology. And now that they've got massive share ⁓ of consumer awareness and consumer relationships, they are actively exploring more ways to deepen their relationship with restaurants and
Andy Sack (15:21)
you .
Zach Goldstein (15:38)
I commend them for that. And in many of those, what they're offering is a lot of value to restaurants. offer free direct ordering and things. think
if I were a restaurant, I would always be a little wary because control of the customer is ultimately the most powerful thing you need. But I do commend DoorDash in particular and their approach for going to trying to offer more and more value to restaurants, seeing that
Their marketplace requires healthy restaurants as well. It can't just be consumers.
Andy Sack (16:08)
Adam, two things. I want to move the conversation to sort of the impact of AI on loyalty and like AI, what does it mean to be AI first and
at a restaurant and deal with loyalty. But really, in the interim, we had a technical glitch, Zach, and Adam was educating me. Adam, do you want to just share with the audience what you said to me about Zach's humble statement, referencing specifically the article that he wrote in 2019?
Adam Brotman (16:36)
Yeah, I
was saying, so I was telling Andy, Zach, that this topic is one that you are very well versed on and passionate about. it's a lot of why you built Thanx is that you just have been always passionate about the customer relationship. We've always shared that sentiment.
He's very knowledgeable and very passionate about this topic of third party marketplaces and kind of where they're at and kind of what that means. And I said, you've been a pioneer and very smart about this topic of not just
The importance of relationships with the customer but what you do with the data that comes from that and I think that's a good segue to talk about AI like, you you're you are I Mean back in the day God way back in the way back between five years ago before this thing called transformer models and generative AI kind of became
Andy Sack (17:08)
Okay.
Adam Brotman (17:27)
like a reality you and I used to have to deal in our lives Starbucks and Thanx and otherwise was like
good old-fashioned data scientists and machine learning and handwritten software, God forbid, and all that kind of stuff.
now, of generative AI, you can give a pretty good data set to a chat GPT, a Claude, a Gemini, et cetera.
And it can do things with it that you and I used to have to deploy teams and the data had to be a certain way and all that. Now it's so much more powerful. And so we'd love to get at your sense of how has generative AI in the last two to three years accelerated, changed what you can do to help restaurants take advantage of the data they do have because
Andy Sack (18:00)
.
Adam Brotman (18:18)
of the first party relationships they have Thanks to
Platforms like Thanx.
Zach Goldstein (18:23)
Yeah, so I have never been more excited about what we do than right now. And it's because of exactly what you just described. The challenge restaurants are often facing is that, first of all, they don't have the data. We've done a great job solving that problem. We have excellent penetration of our loyalty programs and first party digital ordering. The data is now something that is a solvable problem for restaurants. What remains hard
And I'd say we are best in class on this. The reason people leave legacy loyalty technology
Andy Sack (18:51)
Okay.
Zach Goldstein (18:53)
is because they find it too hard to do anything with the data. And we've done a whole lot for a decade now to try to make that a lot easier with automations and lifecycle campaigns and things. But this AI era is what's going to take that to the next level. And so when we talk to restaurants about why they're moving to Thanx, we regularly hear
Andy Sack (18:54)
Okay.
Zach Goldstein (19:16)
I just want to be able to act on my data. want to move away from rote discounting and spray and pray marketing messaging. Just
as an example. And yet even on our platform where it's a lot easier to do segmentation and personalization, many restaurants still on month one blast out a discount to as many people as they can. And so when we ask them why, the answer is generally I was in a hurry or I'm nervous to stop doing what I've historically done.
Andy Sack (19:28)
.
Zach Goldstein (19:46)
And it's the operational burden that has often stopped marketers from doing really smart
things. Our suite of AI products is entirely focused there. Let marketers be great at what they do around branding, but make it easier for them to talk more uniquely and personally to the consumer.
Andy Sack (19:52)
. .
Zach Goldstein (20:05)
So the first thing we released is segment AI, which is the ability and natural language to break your customers into any segment you want, however complex, just by writing who you want to talk to.
can be driving down the road and you have this brilliant stroke of genius and you want
Andy Sack (20:20)
Okay. Okay.
Zach Goldstein (20:20)
to target people in the part of the country that got hit by ice storms who previously have purchased your hot beverages before and who haven't been back in the last two weeks. Who knows how many people are in that segment, but that should be easy to do while you're driving home. The historical way to do that was download your CRM data, give it to a business analyst, have them write the query to figure out how to slice and dice it.
turn that into a segment of emails, upload that email segment to your database to start executing.
It was just hard. If you want to vary the offers and rewards you send, someone's got to do the work to click through all the items in your point of sale and add them to an offer. If you want to run a BOGO burger, you got to find all your burgers in your menu. It's manual work. So offer AI allows our customers
to create the offer just by natural language and no longer have to go through all of that hassle of creating offers, which means that brands can have lots more offers that they're testing without the manual work of configuring them. And the list goes on and on as we think about campaigns. know, often people are heavily dependent on email, but the best place to personalize your interactions with your guests may be in your ordering experience. So instead of telling people it's the Super Bowl,
and I want to run a campaign giving a discount to people for packages that could be good for the Super Bowl. For the people that regularly place big orders, maybe the whole app experience should be Super Bowl oriented. That was just oversight because it was one more thing you needed to do. Campaign AI allows you to do a cohesive multi-channel campaign with ⁓ the LLM connecting those dots on our platform. And so these are the tools.
Andy Sack (21:41)
you. Okay.
.
Zach Goldstein (22:04)
that we believe make personalized marketing easier. And if personalized marketing is easier, then lean mean marketing teams will do more of it and move away from the untargeted discounts, which tend to really not move the needle very much.
But people still do them because they just don't have the capacity to do anything else.
Andy Sack (22:23)
Zach, we find when talking to restaurant and retail chains, executives at those companies, that
The level of understanding of just how powerful the new AI tools are and what it entails, you know, the enthusiasm that you have, I think for loyalty, we have more broadly for lots of applications of AI. And I think a lot of it's just, they know it's a big deal, but you know, they're busy and they don't have time to learn and...
you know, old dog, new trick. give some concrete advice that if you're an executive at a restaurant chain, what do you tell them to do in the next 90 days?
Zach Goldstein (23:07)
all to stay the same thing that we're telling our organization to do, which is this is a 10,000 hours problem and you got to start counting the hours. The only way to get up the chain, you got to be using these tools and learning and having aha moments. And so we are measuring our team internally on just usage, token usage. And we have confidence in our team that they're not hacking the system just to show up high on the token leaderboard. They're actually
trying things that are productive. But our belief is every employee at Thanx must be adopting, in our case, Claude Code and must be using more tokens month over month than they did the month before. And that is an expectation of their job. And I would say for those of us in, yeah.
Andy Sack (23:50)
Zach, just to
interrupt you, that's exactly what we say as well. don't say, it's the same message. We say number of prompts per day. Just get your usage up because it's the easiest thing to track. Did you have something else you want to add? Because I have another follow-up question.
Zach Goldstein (24:06)
Well, I think it's very comparable even for folks that are much earlier on the AI adoption curve. You know, the idea of saying Claude Code is like, that's intimidating for lots of people. I think it's exactly what you just said, Andy. It can start with just every time you're about to pick up something to ask yourself, can I initiate this with AI first, even if ultimately I end up doing work the more traditional way? Getting into that mind space is what yields the
Andy Sack (24:13)
⁓ totally.
Zach Goldstein (24:33)
the breakthroughs that we've seen for our team and for our customers.
Andy Sack (24:37)
Let me, this is going to be my last question. I'm going to direct it to both of you. Well, I think it's my last question. I'm going to direct it to both of you. You earlier talked about really the five, you wrote the article of the four horsemen and, then you referenced how, how powerful your DoorDash, in Uber eats have become on some level Similarly, the LLMs are doing the same thing. Like.
There is a disintermediation, I guess, of Google, but of lots more, like of anything. And
I'm curious, like, as you look out, not over five years, but as you look out over three years, and let's stay focused on restaurants, either loyalty or not, like, what is AI a response to the DoorDash problem? Does it introduce it again?
Like what's your take on AI as a disintermediating force to the businesses of restaurant chains and retail chains?
Zach Goldstein (25:38)
think that's the most interesting question for this next couple of years with regard to restaurants and third party marketplaces. The benefit of being a marketplace, what gives DoorDash so much power is that they control the consumers. So if you have the demand side of the marketplace monopolized, you have a lot of power. The LLMs and AI in general create a massive disruption opportunity for marketplaces because the demand is no longer something you can monopolize.
And so what does that look like? ⁓ It could be that having the DoorDash app is what makes it so prominent that you, you're hungry, you think I'll go to DoorDash first, not I'll go to a restaurant first. That's a really powerful demand side control. But if everything initiates actually through an LLM and not through those marketplaces, they've lost their control. That's a potentially very exciting opportunity for restaurants for the little guy, if you will.
Andy Sack (26:05)
you
Zach Goldstein (26:30)
The flip side, of course, is, and we just saw this play out in the Super Bowl ads, right? OpenAI and Anthropic have very different ideas on how their platforms will evolve. And one of them starting to think about business a little bit like a marketplace and how do they monetize that? How do they create ads around that? And so do they move in the marketplace dynamic or do they move to be more of, you know, in service of the consumer, if you will? I think that's still a
a Wild Wild West question that we'll find out and it will play out very differently for restaurants depending on how things evolve and how frankly how consumer usage evolves in this category.
Andy Sack (27:08)
Adam, do you have anything you want to proffer as a projection or a comment on this topic?
Adam Brotman (27:15)
Only that I agree with Zach that there's a massive disruption opportunity, not just to the marketplaces, but just to the way we all buy things. well, I think I'm guessing still the vast, vast majority of what people do with DoorDash, Uber Eats delivery. I mean, you can do pickup, by the way, I do pickup with them all the time.
I don't know if I'm supposed be embarrassed to say that, but I do. this gets really weird to say, but I was in LA recently, and there's these little food delivery robot carts that are driving all around on the sidewalks, while you got Waymo's driving all around on the streets.
Andy Sack (28:28)
.
Adam Brotman (28:00)
you know, like people like Zach and I, Andy has learned that Zach, you and I are kind of sickos when it comes to thinking about this stuff. Like I'm just sitting there looking at all that going, this is fascinating because yes, DoorDash has done all this stuff and UberEats has done all this stuff. But what happens when, you know, Tesla drivers become robo taxis and then and there's these little carts and robots. There's like disintermediation of the disintermediation, et cetera, et cetera. And it
And so
my only point is it's going to be fascinating to see what happens. And we're probably going to go into a world where.
Everyone has their own personal agent. So it's kind of exactly what you saying. It's less about, do I reach for the Starbucks app or do I reach for the DoorDash app? It's going to be more of, what does my agent decide to do? And is it like,
Zach Goldstein (28:38)
Yes.
Adam Brotman (28:52)
looking for an app? Is it looking for an API? Does it start to have choices? And I have a feeling things are going to get really, really weird in that regard. I the restaurants are going to be the restaurants. That's the cool thing. If I'm a restaurant chain owner, as competitive as things are, and as crazy as all this is, I'm like, what did we say this morning, Andy, when we were talking? Chat GPT is not going to be making a latte for you. So they're not going be making a burger.
Andy Sack (29:17)
Or making, I think
I do with the exact was ChatGPT is not going to make a burger.
Adam Brotman (29:21)
it's like Zach, you said at the beginning of this podcast, the fundamentals of being a great restaurant don't change. Have a great brand, have a great product, provide a great experience, have great food and beverage, and connect with your customers in any way you can. All this other craziness that's going to develop should work to your benefit if you're paying attention and you're being AI forward.
It's going to be an interesting next few years. I mean, I do want to say, Zach, I really liked what you said about your different things as those different products like AI campaign and AI. I can't remember you had those cool like sub brands that you came up with your product names and like that. That's you're right. You said it really well. is restaurants have an opportunity to leapfrog. They've been the laggards and all of a sudden because of Gen AI, they can they actually can get out ahead of everyone else because
now they've got the data, they've got the physical stuff going on. They can just be like, great, I'm to have AI just help me leapfrog, and I can become very, very sophisticated, not just about marketing and loyalty, but about everything. And so it's, I'm excited about it.
Zach Goldstein (30:30)
Well, so this technology
can increase hospitality, which is a question that restaurants regularly ask themselves, does technology disinter and immediate me from my customer? And I think this is where restaurants are wrong when they're worried about that, because it can actually increase hospitality. I'll give you a preview in what we'll be rolling out next quarter. A huge volume of digital orders.
Andy Sack (30:47)
I got it.
Yeah, please. feel free, Zach,
feel free to plug it.
Zach Goldstein (30:53)
Okay, great. the next one in the tool is we call it recovery AI. Guest recovery is a big challenge for restaurants. Things go wrong. Restaurants are difficult operational machines. You deliver the wrong item. You missed on something. Restaurants all know that things go wrong. The burden when something goes wrong is the restaurant is overwhelmed already and they're receiving calls or emails or something from the customer saying this messed up.
And they, in real time, have to decide what to do about that. Well, what a shame, because in our CRM, we know everything about, let's say, Adam, in this case, all his previous purchases, the fact that nothing's gone wrong on any of those. That's very different from someone who complained the last three times they placed a pickup order, and Adam, who's come 80 times, never complained, but this time says, hey, my food was cold. And knowing that context about the guest enables
perfect recovery efforts that are specific and on brand to your approach at the restaurant. That can all be automated so that it's no longer creating a burden for the staff who's trying to deal with the guest in front of them while answering the phone while dealing with recovery of the guest from an hour ago. And that is really exciting to us because it improves hospitality.
Adam Brotman (32:11)
Look at customer service. So Zach, like
you're saying, like a customer service agent bought whatever you want to call it, could is connected to the Thanx data and effectively can make a judgment call algorithmically based on its own knowledge. And it can both operationally and judgmentally take that burden off and automate.
Andy Sack (32:22)
Action.
Adam Brotman (32:37)
So you get a good recovery. That's a cool idea. Yeah.
Zach Goldstein (32:38)
That's right. I
Andy Sack (32:39)
Yeah,
Zach Goldstein (32:39)
placed an
Andy Sack (32:40)
super.
Zach Goldstein (32:40)
order in the app directly. I gave it a thumbs down because something went wrong. I explained what went wrong. And the LLM combined with the Thanx data goes and looks at what are your recovery rules as a brand? What is your approach to customer engagement and recovery? How generous do you want to be when doing recovery? What is the lifetime value of this guest? And automatically jumps in to figure out the right message and the right make right so that it doesn't burden your staff.
Adam Brotman (33:08)
And puts the recovery voucher, so to speak, right into their account because you've already got that relationship. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah.
Zach Goldstein (33:14)
Precisely.
Andy Sack (33:14)
Yeah,
that's awesome. Zach, thank you so much. Can't wait for the, we had a little recovery ourselves in this podcast. ⁓ And, you know, thanks for being on here. We're super excited about what Thanx is doing. I'm really looking forward to your next.
Zach Goldstein (33:22)
That's right.
Andy Sack (33:32)
I don't know if it's two horsemen or three horsemen. Maybe it's four, but there's one about LLMs and in the role of the restaurant industry and really the comparison to what DoorDash does. If you write that article, my request would be take a position on whether DoorDash wins or loses. Because I could argue either way. I'm super interested in your opinion. Thank you for being on. All right.
Zach Goldstein (33:53)
Yep. As soon as I know, I will try.
Adam Brotman (33:57)
Yeah.
Andy Sack (33:58)
Thank you for being on. Adam, anything you want to highlight for our audience in conclusion since we're at time?
Adam Brotman (34:06)
yes, I want to highlight that I really am intrigued by what Zach said at the end, but it's kind of some of the other things we were talking about, of now it's no longer, ⁓ I've got a digital relationship with some data. I think in the era of Gen.ai, as a restaurant leader,
I should be looking for opportunities for magic. should be saying, well, what else? I think Zach nailed it. It's always been, God, the operational fatigue of it's not that I don't want to do these things, but it's now like, you know, platforms like Thanx and thinking like that. I think that restaurant leaders should hear this and everybody, not just restaurant, but every leader should hear this and go like, wow, like
Andy Sack (34:49)
Thank
Adam Brotman (34:54)
AI can actually make the experience better. It can actually make my operations better. And I don't have to, it's not a heavy lift like it used to be. So don't just assume this is like in the past where the tech might've been interesting, but I still had this operational heavy lift. We're now entering in an era where that may not be the case. So I really want to highlight that Zach said that and for others to sort of think about the implications for their business around that.
Andy Sack (35:19)
All right, on that note, let's call this episode a wrap. Thank you, Zach. Thank you, Adam. Thank you to the audience for listening to AI First with Adam and Andy. For more resources on how to become AI First, you can visit our website, www.form3.com. You can download case studies, research briefings, executive summaries, and join our email list. Also want to invite you to
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