When Fogo de Chão leaders told Chief Culture Officer Selma Oliveira that they wanted her help answering the phones, she had some questions, but she was willing.
“What do you need me to do?” she said. “I’d be glad to answer all the phones. I don’t know how I could do it, but tell me how.’”
“It was just like her,” CEO Barry McGowan said, recalling his conversation with the woman known as Fogo's “brand matriarch.”
The response was typical of Oliveira’s can-do attitude and commitment to Fogo, the Brazilian steakhouse chain she has helped grow across the country after becoming the manager of its first U.S. restaurant nearly 30 years ago.
But having her literally answer the phone in all of its 88 domestic locations was not exactly what the chain had in mind.
Instead, it wanted to use Oliveira’s voice and personality to power its new AI phone answering system.
The company was exploring AI as a way to take some pressure off of employees, who field tens of thousands of phone calls a year. That created extra work for them and took their focus off serving customers in the restaurant, McGowan said. Also, they weren’t always able to get to every call.
At the same time, the chain wanted to preserve the hospitality and service the brand is known for, which is where Oliveira came in.
“We don’t want it to be mechanical, like you’re making a reservation on an airline, telling you to press numbers,” McGowan said. “We wanted Selma, somebody hospitable, answering our phones.”
Fogo set up Oliveira in a recording studio, where she spent days reading scripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The recordings were used to train the AI bot, developed by PolyAI.
Today, when a customer calls one of Fogo’s restaurants, they will speak to Selma, an AI version of Oliveira, who can help them make a reservation, answer questions about hours or the menu, or connect them with a manager if necessary.
The system has worked well so far. Ninety-five percent of customers report being satisfied with it, and 88% who start the booking process with Selma end up completing it with her. The conversion rate is far higher than the company’s expectations of 40% to 50%.
“What I love most is we don’t hear the phone ringing off the hook anymore in the dining room,” McGowan said.
Fogo is one of a number of restaurant chains turning to AI to automate phone calls, which remain a pain point for many operators even as more of their business has moved online.
Not only is it easing employees’ workload, but the technology is also helping Fogo gather more data on its customers via an integration with reservations system OpenTable. It’s part of Fogo’s broader plan to centralize its data and use it to offer more personalized experiences for customers.
Down the road, the company also plans to use Selma internally. The AI could be used to generate training materials or answer calls from employees to the support center, McGowan said.
When it came to choosing the identity for Fogo’s AI, Oliveira was a natural choice.
In 1997, she was working in a Marriott hotel in Addison, Texas, when she met the chain’s Brazilian founders, brothers Arri and Jair Coser, who were in town to scout U.S. locations for their brand. As the only other person at the hotel who spoke Portuguese, she acted as their translator and gave them the lay of the land.
When the Cosers settled on a location to open the first U.S. Fogo, they asked Oliveira to be the manager. She would go on to train every area director in the chain as it expanded around the U.S. over the next three decades. She eventually became director of operations, then COO, and now chief culture officer, where she works to recruit talent and shape the brand’s people-focused ethos.
McGowan called her the “DNA of the brand.” “She embedded the culture,” he said. “Her whole thesis around service was just, listen, pay attention and make sure they are exceptionally satisfied.”
She is the kind of leader a restaurant chain would like to have in every location, if only that were possible. With the help of AI, Fogo is hoping to do the next best thing.
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