Restaurant operators are facing unprecedented challenges in attracting and retaining talent. This session will describe how McDonald’s USA, LLC selected Aon to bring Rewards expertise as an optional resource to Restaurant Operators during this challenging time. Aon has been conducting hands-on interactive learning sessions titled “Pay Matters” to help prepare franchise owners / operators to make independent, informed, strategic compensation decisions to ensure they can best compete for talent in the current market.

Come hear from McDonald’s and Aon’s rewards experts as they discuss:
• The compensation challenges for Restaurants given the today’s talent market
• Education on tools and resources available to support operators 
• An overview of the approach Aon took to building the “Pay Matters” experience
• Learnings and feedback from McDonald’s “Pay Matters” sessions

Join Ed McBride, VP of IT, Dave's Hot Chicken, Will Kelso, SVP Managed Network & Business Intelligence, Interface Systems, and Courtney Radke, Field CISO, Retail & Hospitality, Fortinet, discuss the top technologies driving changes in the way restaurants operate. 

This will be an interactive session with discussions with the panelists and the audience on best practices on leveraging technologies to improve the guest dine-in and take-out experience and enhance the employee experience to reduce turnover. 

Paradox’s SVP, Strategic Enterprise Engagement, Ben Bromberg, discusses how 25,000+ restaurants have employed conversational AI hiring assistants to automate and simplify hiring processes -- providing 24/7 mobile-first candidate communications to increase speed and efficiency and returning hours of time per week back to managers. 

Key takeaways:
- Dive into why conversational recruiting is the go-to hiring experience for high-volume businesses, returning hours back to hiring managers each week and transforming hiring processes
- Learn how conversational AI and automation enabled restaurants to massively increase speed to hire to hit historical hiring numbers
- Explore how to remove friction from your application and hiring process to hire faster and get more candidates

Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) face unique challenges such as speed, quality of service, staff turnover, drive-thru automation, and accuracy, making the “quick” of a QSR a moving target. Evolving customer expectations—increasingly driven by new digital capabilities—are pushing brands to offer greater speed, convenience, and personalization.

Fortunately, artificial intelligence is helping QSRs make the customer experience frictionless, fast, and significantly more pleasant. Leveraging AI-powered computer vision and NLP conversational AI unlocks enormous value for QSR operators eager to use technology to transform what’s possible in foodservice.

Deploying AI solutions in restaurants requires the technology ecosystem players to work together to optimize the configuration, performance, and cost of the solution. But knowing where to start is always the big question. So, we’ve brought together two CEOs from leading restaurant automation software companies, an IoT expert from the world’s largest CPU manufacturer, and an Edge AI expert to talk about real-life applications of AI-enabled QSR solutions that are already paying big dividends.

Key Learnings:

• Understand the primary benefits of how AI can transform your restaurant operations
• How to maximize the value of your data and gain deeper insights on your guests to drive higher levels of visit frequency and brand loyalty
• How to leverage voice ordering and AI to drive greater order accuracy and labor efficiencies at the drive-thru and in-store

During this session we will explore how market leading brands create winning cultures, execute consistently, and win over consumers to achieve abnormal returns. This facilitator lead interactive session is designed to foster a "CEO's mindset" in all who participate. By examining some of the restaurant industry's most successful brands, clear patterns emerge that we can harness in our own organizations. Each participant will walk away with a step by step plan to focus, simplify, and deliver on five key drivers of growth; a perfect way to crystalize knowledge you've gained from this year's event!

The past two years have seen the foodservice industry beset by unprecedented challenges. In addition to Covid-induced shut downs, the emergence of nontraditional competition like virtual brands and the resurgence of supermarkets have created competitive complexity for operators already under stress. At the same time, many diners have become committed couch potatoes, ordering and consuming meals from a wide variety of sources in the confines of their homes.

In order to break through the competitive clutter, operators will need to double down on food and beverage innovation.  A memorable menu experience—the kind that builds traffic, generates buzz and elicits an enthusiastic “wow!”—begins and ends with an appealing, creative menu. This presentation will examine its essential elements, including the foods and flavors, preparation and presentation techniques that restaurateurs and menu marketers across all segments can employ to surprise and delight customers and to make their operation the dining option of choice.

With a crowded marketplace and time-pressed consumers, restaurant marketing is now more important than ever. This expert panel will discuss the role marketing plays in the major changes that have come about since the pandemic began and how marketers can leverage relationships across their brands to drive results.