[Customer Spotlight] How JRI Hospitality Uses Outcome-Driven AI to Empower Restaurant Teams

In the rapidly evolving world of restaurant technology, there is a fine line between tools that are "fun to watch" and those that deliver measurable results. For Bo Fairbanks, Vice President of Analytics & Technology at JRI Hospitality, the focus is squarely on the latter. JRI Hospitality, which operates over 140 restaurants — including 135+ Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers locations — is leveraging AI not to replace the human element of hospitality, but to empower it.

During a recent session of Crunchtime’s Ops Innovators Webinar series, Bo shared how JRI is moving beyond traditional reporting and toward a future of “guided action."

Filtering the Noise: Outcome-Driven AI

With the influx of "flashy" AI solutions in the market, Bo emphasized that the primary challenge for restaurant leaders is filtering through the noise. At JRI, every AI evaluation begins with a simple set of questions:

• Does it improve consistency?
• Does it help leaders make better decisions?
• Does it save time and improve the guest experience?

"If a solution can produce a measurable result in one of those areas, it's worth evaluating," Bo noted. "If it can't, it's probably more fun to watch than it is valuable to implement".

AI Applications Today

JRI is already seeing success by applying AI to solve specific business problems across various departments:

• People & Recruiting
  • Identifying and sourcing candidates
  • Facilitating interviews
  • Improving the speed and consistency of hiring
• Document Management & Knowledge
  • Extracting and structuring information from documents and PDFs
  • Reducing manual data entry and processing
  • Making information more accessible across the organization
• Operations
  • Supporting forecasting and planning
  • Identifying trends to improve decision-making
  • Analyzing guest sentiment at scale
  • Surfacing recurring themes that require attention
• Analytics & Data
  • Accelerating analytics and solution development

• • Analyzing data more efficiently
    
    

Scaling Brand Standards through Company Acquisitions

JRI recently acquired an additional franchisee group, adding 40 restaurants across several states. This growth presented a significant challenge: aligning different processes, reporting rhythms, and operating playbooks.

To navigate this, JRI used AI for market alignment analysis. By quickly modeling different geographic and organizational scenarios, the AI accelerated the analysis and helped the leadership team arrive at a recommended hierarchy faster.

Going forward, Bo explained that they’re excited to leverage Crunchtime’s AI forecasting feature within Crunchtime Inventory to help generate faster, more accurate forecasts.

“As we onboard Freddy's onto Crunchtime Inventory, we're excited about the potential of AI-driven forecasting. If we can deliver a more accurate forecast while reducing the time our teams spend building it, that's an easy win.”

The Future: Moving Toward Guided Action

One of the most compelling insights from the session was the concept of moving from analysis to guided action. Bo explained that while JRI has invested heavily in clean data pipelines and integrated systems with Crunchtime, the next step is using AI agents to provide proactive direction.

Bo said, “In the future, by continuously reviewing information and providing guidance, AI can help create more consistent outcomes across the organization without requiring every operator to be a data analyst.”

Instead of a regional manager manually reviewing every submission on an Ops Execution form, an AI agent could evaluate responses, flag concerns, and automatically create follow-up tasks.

"The real opportunity goes beyond identifying issues," Bo explained. "AI can help explain why a problem is happening and guide leaders toward the areas that will have the greatest impact".

This allows field leaders to maintain consistency across a growing organization without requiring every operator to be a data analyst.

Ready to see how practical AI built for restaurants can transform your operations? Watch the full webinar recording here or explore the Crunchtime AI Buyer's Guide for more insights.