Leon Davoyan, the chief technology officer for Dave’s Hot Chicken, has ramped up the application of artificial intelligence across the restaurant chain’s operations, including the drive-thru, mobile ordering, rover delivery, and robotic arms that whip up french fries.
But he is cautious not to lose the human touch of hospitality. That AI-enabled drive-thru—a trendy application of AI that historically hasn’t had the smoothest deployment for larger chains including McDonald’s and Taco Bell—isn’t intended to replace workers. “Our strategy is to allow the human to do more with the robot assistant,” says Davoyan.
All that said, successful deployments of AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies could give Dave’s Hot Chicken an edge in the fast-growing and highly competitive chicken restaurant category that includes incumbent brands like Chick-fil-A and Popeyes and fast-growing concepts like Raising Cane’s, Hangry Joe’s Hot Chicken & Wings, and Dave’s. Quick-service and fast-casual chicken restaurants expanded their domestic unit count by 4.7% in 2024 from the prior year, along with a sales leap of nearly 10%, according to market research Datassential.
Adding more AI-enabled functionality to Dave’s Hot Chicken’s ordering systems has been a core priority for Davoyan over the past year and a half and will continue to be an area of focus in 2026. He has launched AI drive-thru ordering and hopes that the learnings from this application can be used to train large language models that could be tapped for similar functionality in the company’s mobile app.
Dave’s Hot Chicken, which was acquired by private equity firm Roark Capital in a deal valued at around $1 billion earlier this year, is also working with several vendors to develop more precise predictions for when food will be ready. The times are then displayed on a digital order board within the store. When stores are busy, orders can take up to 45 minutes to be ready. Davoyan says he wants the predictive technology to get inside two minutes of accuracy.
At the test stores where these systems have been deployed, Davoyan says the chain is adding seven to eight more transactions per week above locations that don’t have this feature. “The hypothesis is becoming true that if you serve up order-ready times more accurately, then the orders will come,” he adds.
Dave’s Hot Chicken has also implemented some text-based updates for mobile orders, and in the future, Davoyan says he wants to add in-app order status updates similar to what DoorDash and Uber Eats offers.
At the front counter of the restaurant, Dave’s Hot Chicken has deployed kiosks, which are positioned to be slightly tilted so the cashier can monitor ordering progress and step in if there are any issues. The company says 23% of in-restaurant orders are booked by the kiosks today, and they increase the check amount by an average of 5.9%. Davoyan says this revenue generation results in a return on investment that’s under a year.
“We don’t remove the human element,” says Davoyan. “We have yet to reduce head count with all the things that we’re testing.”
Davoyan has also rolled out Microsoft Copilot across the corporate office, though he’s not completely sold on the maturity of the technology. “I think there are other solutions that we should explore,” he says.
Other internal applications of AI include customer service, where favorable restaurant reviews get an AI-written response that’s automatically published online, while the reviews with more critical feedback are reviewed and edited by a customer service agent before the AI drafted response is approved.
AI is also being used for drone and rover deliveries and will be incorporated in the company’s two test robotic arms at the fry station. “We’re going to use AI to predict how many fries we’re going to need,” says Davoyan, who wants these robots to produce a constant flow of fresh fries that doesn’t hurt food quality.
He says that the autonomous french fry functionality is seeing a return on investment, but not yet below the two-year threshold that Dave’s Hot Chicken looks for when spending on tech. “Robots are very expensive,” says Davoyan. “It creates a barrier of entry for restaurants.”
Dave’s Hot Chicken also managed to completely avoid the Amazon Web Services cloud outage that ensnared tech firms, banks, and airlines in October. The company’s point of sale system relies on the vendor Qu, which has installed a physical device that runs cloud locally in every store. “We made all of our customers deploy the edge device,” says Amir Hudda, Qu’s CEO, whose other clients include Blaze Pizza and Jack in the Box. None of those restaurants were impacted by the AWS shutdown.
Davoyan says Infrastructure is easy to take for granted because of the general reliability that tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft offer their customers. But big outages have become more commonplace, including at Cloudflare last month and Microsoft Azure in October. And because restaurants operate on extremely thin margins, they cannot afford lost sales when POS systems are down and orders need to be halted or processed by hand.
“We knew that the day would come where there would be some level of meltdown and because we have high volume locations, we made that a priority,” says Davoyan. “You should always have a backup plan.”
John Kell
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