Drive-thru AI provider Presto has hired an AI specialist from Wendy’s to launch a new analytics service.
Michael Chorey is joining the company as cofounder and president of Presto IQ, a new product that will use Presto’s AI voice data to provide real-time insights for restaurants.
Chorey spent more than five years as Wendy’s head of innovation and AI, and was instrumental in developing the chain’s AI drive-thru system, FreshAI. The system is now in about 300 locations, and the chain plans to expand it to up to 600 by the end of the year.
By joining Presto, Chorey feels he will be able to leave an even bigger mark on the industry.
“I’m going from maybe 6,000 or 7,000 restaurants to hundreds of thousands of restaurant drive-thrus and hundreds of brands,” he said in an interview. “This is where we’re going to make a meaningful impact.”
Michael Chorey. | Photo courtesy of Presto
Presto IQ is a new business unit for Presto, which provides drive-thru voice technology for brands including Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s, Taco John’s and Wienerschnitzel.
The goal is to use data gathered from those interactions to give operators more visibility into what’s going on in the drive-thru, the largest sales channel in fast food.
Before the rise of voice AI, drive-thru data was typically limited to whatever an employee punched into the point-of-sale. But by digitizing and transcribing those transactions, AI has added new layers of information and made it more easily accessible.
“I’ll tell you, through my experience working at a brand, at best, your performance data is lagging by a week, and it’s usually not very detailed,” Chorey said. With Presto, “we have the ability to see what people are adding to their bag, what order they’re doing things in, and it helps us give better information to those brands and leaders, because these are data points they’ve never had access to.”
Presto IQ’s first customer will be Presto Voice. The company will feed its drive-thru voice data into the analytics engine and use the results to improve its upselling capabilities. Brands using Presto will get the benefit of that.
But beyond that, Presto believes the market for this type of product could be very large.
“The idea is, Presto IQ stands on its own, and every participant in the QSR industry, whether it’s QSR brands themselves, franchisees, other vendors, financiers, lenders, insurers, all these guys could benefit from having more real-time data that closes the loop,” said Krishna Gupta, Presto’s cofounder and co-CEO. “Presto IQ wants to be the repository of dynamic data offerings for the QSR industry.”
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