– Todd Kaufman, I’m CIO for SSP America, been there about 18 years. SSP America does restaurants and airports. So we have about 480 restaurants across 59 airports in the US and Canada.

– In Canada as well?

– In Dano.

– Yep.

– Yep. And my role is to oversee all of IT. I’ve been there from when we had an IT department at two and now we’re now at about 44 in the IT department and they’re growing quite a lot.

– It’s a big group.

– Yeah, it’s a big group and the company’s growing a lot. So the company went from, we crossed a billion dollars in revenue last year and continues to go up.

– That’s fantastic. I didn’t realize you guys were in that many airports.

– Yep.

– 44 years from like every major airport in the US.

– Yeah, I mean, there’s still some we’re not, but as of today, we’re still trying.

– Still working on it, yeah.

– Yeah, so we’re throughout the entire area.

– Okay, well, let’s try the first one and then I’ll.

– Okay, I’m excited. Oh, a smoky heat. Ooh, they’re good wings too.

– They are really good.

– I’m hungry, so I’m gonna keep eating them, but ask away.

– You dig in.

– Especially before they get too big and they start burning my mouth.

– Yeah, that’s right. Very good. So been in this for a while, how did you get your start? How’d you end up in hospitality? That’s not a normal track for a CIO.

– Right, so, well, actually I majored in political science.

– Okay.

– And then I worked on Capitol Hill for a year and I realized I did not wanna work on Capitol Hill anymore. And so then literally I just went and got a job waiting tables and bartending. So I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

– Yeah.

– And then I think it just kind of led into that was right before, that was around 1998. Micros was hiring at the time, getting ready for the Y2K bug.

– Sure.

– I got a job with them just doing implementation and I kind of grew from there.

– Last, you got into POS implementations.

– POS implementation, right? And I always joked that I’m a really lucky person because I literally on my first day at Micros, we sat down and a gentleman came up and he said, “All right, this half of the room is gonna earn 8,700,” which is the hotel product. “And this half of the room will earn 3,700,” which is the restaurant. I was on a room of 3,700 and yeah.

– It’s like random choice.

– Random choice, random, like, you know, who knows? Maybe I’d be sitting here with the Hilton group or something right now, but.

– So in ’98, Micros was probably by far the biggest player in TOS space.

– Yeah, and they were the first that were Y2K compatible and advertising and they were… And in that time, there was a lot of companies had built their own PLS systems from the old cash stores. And so Micros was by far, not only the biggest, but where everybody was going, especially with the Y2Ks.

– Most advanced, yeah, yeah. Most programmable, everything, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great. What an interesting, like, weird place to find yourself, right?

– Yeah, yeah, it was. And, you know, it was a good job at the time, traveled a lot.

– Yeah.

– You know, got to do everything and learn a lot about the business beyond just from my waiting tables.

– Yeah, I mean, you had to learn everything because you had to program it into the system to be able to do that.

– Yeah, exactly. And everything was still learned at the time. Everything was, you know, I think they had version one of an inventory system. I think hot schedules at the time was nothing but an Excel spreadsheet online, if it was even online yet.

– It was even there, right? Yeah.

– Yeah, it was the early days. So we got to see it grow.

– I don’t even think hot schedules was around back then.

– So, you know, I’m trying to think of those guys, what Casey and David and when, and, you know, I think, I don’t know when they actually went online, but you’re right, probably not, probably not yet.

– Probably not for a couple more years. Wow. What’d you think of that one?

– I liked it. I’m ready for a little spicier.

– They get a little hotter.

– Okay.

– Not a whole lot, but this. So this one, this is a peri-peri sauce, the second one. Let’s give it a shy.

– What sauce is that? Just a wing sauce.

– Good. I think this one’s really good. It’s got a really nice flavor.

– A lot of flavor. I’m gonna keep, these are good wings just in general. You keep eating them.

– Yeah, I think these, I think this one is, I don’t know exactly what the fruit is. I keep thinking it’s tamarind, but it’s got a little bit more of a fruit flavor to it.

– It does. I’m gonna hope they cut out when I start eating the bone marrow around these wings, ’cause they’re, I missed lunch.

– That’s right. May or may not, but, and there’s a lot more wings back there. They can bring you more. If you find a favorite sauce, they’ll give you a whole.

– Yeah, that’s what I want for the takeaway gift.

– That’s right. All right, so, given that you’re in a technology role, I’m gonna stick to more of the technology questions, ’cause I think they’re, it’s interesting to hear kind of your perspective. You’ve got a really big portfolio of stuff to take care of. So obviously AI is everywhere. It’s in every product, walk around here, robots running around, do all this stuff. So kind of where are you guys on your journey? Where do you see it going? Like, where do you see the biggest impact from AI going?

– Yeah, so that’s a loaded question, because I still think, I tell people today, we’re, it’s 1998, and we’re starting to see Yahoo, and just starting to think about the possibilities of what a web-based and internet-

– Absolutely the case.

– And I think that is where we are with AI. And when we’re talking AI, I think everybody kinda, AI’s been around for a while. I think everybody’s really talking about kind of a more language models, and more how you integrate with it, and the generative AI. So I think the options are really almost unlimited. I think where we are today is we’re focusing less on the customer-facing AI. We’re still a hospitality company. We still want the hospitality. We’ve obviously put in some automations, and some things for other customers, kiosks and that kind of stuff. But I think AI can really change the support center model, what we do on a day-to-day basis, how you interact with your data.

– Yeah.

– That’s a big one. You know, I would love to see it. And I believe we will get to a point where you can cut call volumes down, and try and email the right person, to get the right information, or building dashboards, or building reports.

– Yeah.

– You know, I wanna get to the point where, and I think we’re almost there, where AI can do most of that.

– Yep.

– It can produce everything from training guides, and manuals, and on-the-spot learning, how to use stuff. It can help with cases, and support desk tickets, and you know, that kind of information. And I could focus again, I think a big part of that is all this data. What do I do with it? Whether or not it’s-

– Yeah.

– Creating my own KPIs, my own dashboards, that I can just do as simple as, you know, making a wish list, and typing it up. Or whether or not it’s a push thing of AI is telling you what to look at, and when. As opposed to trying to go back, and figure it out, and tell me.

– I mean, I always kind of wonder like, the problem that you guys are solving, it’s very different from like, pretty much any other-

– Right.

– Player in the space that I could think of, right? You have all these different franchises in the same space.

– Yeah.

– They must have like, vast differences between just one, so the one right next door operates a totally different model.

– It’s typical. I mean, we have over 200 different brands that are running our concepts. Some are our own, some are your franchise, some are licensees. They all have different demands. But that’s almost where AI can really come into play, right, to help us figure out where things are similar, where things are different. You know, where we can do, we try to do shared spaces, commissaries, and production kitchens in an airport. So AI can really help us try to figure out-

– Optimize that.

– Optimize it, and it kind of piece. And, you know, it’s just, it’s stuff we are doing today manually a lot of times, and trying to keep up and all that stuff. So AI, just to help us really organize it on demand, get the information the way you want it, the way you decipher it, could be a huge game changer.

– It’s really interesting. I think a lot about this with you guys, ’cause as I’m walking through an airport, I’m like, no, I see your logos up a lot.

– Right.

– I think, you know, this is a very different problem than, you know-

– Correct.

– Typical franchisee down the street.

– Correct. You know, we talk about like AI forecast, and it’s not, it’s gonna be a lot different, because for us, it’s based on gonna be, weather obviously has a big factor, but it’s also gonna be just on passenger counts, and the plane’s taking off.

– Get to this one. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this brand before. This is a Austin brand.

– Okay.

– They recently sold to a major for like a billion dollars, and they did really well, but it was a family. And this one is my favorite.

– And it’s tangy, I’m reading it.

– Yeah, this one and the one we made are both the two I like a lot.

– Oh.

– They’re good.

– All right, so far this is still my favorite.

– You like this one?

– That’s the one.

– Yeah. I think that one’s really good. I love this one. I love the one we made. It’s really, really, it’s really delicious.

– All right, I’m gonna keep eating.

– Yeah, please do. I guess, you know, you’re in this world where you have a lot of tech that you have to manage, but you also have just a ton of people, right? And like a real ton of people.

– Right.

– How are you balancing like the technology aspects of the problem with just kind of the general people aspects, hospitality, even that whole side of the equation?

– You know, that’s the toughest challenge, I think. We never wanna take away hospitality from our business. You have the people, you have, you know, airports are chaotic anyway.

– Yeah.

– A lot of single travelers too. So if you have, they rely on the hospitality, you know, they wanna interact with people and talk and sit down, especially if you’re sitting down in a restaurant or the bar. So we try to do, for instance, a big piece of it. We’ve never went to some of our competitors. We never did an all iPad ordering. We never did 100% mobile. We have those, we have Fiat, but we always try to do kind of interaction, like whatever you do. So I think one of the big things we do with some of our partners for like, I’ll order a table with a QR code, is it completely interacts with our POS and a server. So a server can take an order, take your first order. You can do a reorder on the QR code.

– So you’re balancing the two.

– Correct, so the idea is, we don’t wanna make our customers feel uncomfortable. We don’t wanna force anything on them.

– Yeah.

– But if you’re there and you’re in a rush and you just wanna order your food to pay and go, you wanna make that. If you wanna sit down, enjoy a drink, interact with a server, bartender, we wanna have that as well. So it’s a big balance there.

– That’s interesting. All right, so now we’ve gotten to the one that we made.

– All right, Fourth Degree Burn.

– Yes.

– Good name, by the way. Who came up with that?

– I don’t know. I’m sure marketing did. Hayley, who you met, she lives in Boston. She worked with this chef. She actually went there and they blended and they tasted them until they got one that they were happy with.

– All right.

– That’s this one.

– So I gotta either thank Hayley or blame her.

– That is flavorful.

– I think it’s really good.

– Hmm.

– It’s very fresh tasting.

– It is. Still waiting for the heat though, come on.

– Yeah, we were telling you. Everybody sits down, they’re worried. It’s gonna be, you know, like you watch the show.

– I thought I’d be sweating, I’m ready. I’m like.

– Those guys are crying, they can’t talk. Marketing team was worried we’d have customers throwing up.

– That would have made great video. Come on, let’s be honest.

– It would have been funny video. All right, so I’ve got a couple of different ones on this that I like, and I’m trying to decide. I think that, I’m gonna ask you two out of this category ’cause I think they’re good ones.

– Do I get two wings?

– Yes. So the first one is, what was a leadership lesson? So you’ve obviously done really well in your career, right? And you were responsible for, I would argue, probably one of the largest franchise groups out there. So the question is, what was a hard lesson you learned on your way up?

– To admit when something isn’t working and to stop digging the hole, right? So there’s an old saying, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. And that’s tough to do in a tech world ’cause there are projects you get behind and it should work, it’s a good idea, even if the tech is there, and it just doesn’t work. And you have to accept it. And I tell my guys all the time on my team that I never wanna hear ’em say failure is not an option. Failure 100% is an option going in when you’re doing anything. And you need to recognize when you hit a point of failure and you need to recognize why, and then you need to recognize whether or not it can be saved or you’re better off cutting out.

– Should we abandon or should we find a way around it?

– And there’s been a few projects that I’ve just, I believed in my heart, I sold ’em, I sold ’em out. I said this is gonna work, it was gonna be great. And then you get to a point and for whatever reason, you gotta just say, look, it’s not worth the squeeze. Like it’s not working. And I get we spend time and energy on it and there’s time and money on it, but we have to recognize we can learn from it, but we have to just cut our losses and move on.

– I mean, I do think this whole concept of fail fast really matters, you know?

– Yeah, I think it’s a great point. And I think fail fast is a good, is a true thing. But the truth is it can, a project can fail at any time. Something that was even good, that worked out two years ago.

– Right, might not work anymore.

– Might not work and it might not make sense. And you gotta be willing to adapt and you gotta be willing to adjust. I said, as a company, we’ve grown a lot. I mean, really we’ve grown, since I’ve been there over 600%. And some of the stuff we did that was the right call at the time, no longer works for how the business is set up. And you have to recognize that and not just be stuck with it because you had a lot invested on it or emotionally, money-wise, time-wise, whatever it is.

– All those things.

– Yeah, so I think that’s been, that’s probably been the biggest thing that I still to this day fight with, or not fight, but I see it with other people when you see them pushing well beyond what’s reasonable and you gotta say like, what are we doing at this point?

– Well, I think that’s actually a great answer, right? Like, so many people get so emotionally invested in doing things that they just can’t let it-

– And you gotta come down to what was the point? What were you doing anyway? What was the first point, right? It wasn’t to hire 30 IT guys to go figure out how to do something, right? That was never the point.

– That’s right.

– And then, you know, sometimes it’s a hard conversation.

– So along these lines, this is the more fun question. What would your team say is your superpower and what would they roast you for?

– I said, I don’t know how I do it. I brag that I have, and I’ve been there since 2008, so we’re talking over 17 years. I build from two to 40, you know, some people, and only four people have ever left IT and out of the company volunteer, and two of those people are the same people. So they left, came back, and left again. So my superpower is somehow people do enjoy working for me. And by the way, and they would roast me because that’s what I tell them all the time, that I’ll listen to them. We talk about everything, but I tell them at the end that they might pretend they don’t, but they love their job because they wanna know. All my direct reports, except for one, have been there with me for over a decade, and which in IT is kind of unusual right off.

– It’s unheard of, really.

– Yeah, and especially when you’re doing hospitality IT. So that is definitely my superpower. I think what they roast me for, well, a few things. And if you’ve got an email from me, you already know this, but my grammar is terrible. I cannot spell anything worth saving my life. And for me, there’s very little, and again, this is probably you or at least your team.

– There is a technology for this problem.

– There is a technology, I’m too lazy to use now. And I think half your team would say this, is that there is no professional versus personal approach. I just talk the ways.

– Yeah, great, awesome. All right, let’s do the next one. The next one is a sriracha.

– Ooh, okay.

– I see this a lot in restaurants in Texas. I think it’s pretty good.

– I’m ready for some hotness.

– Nah, it’s probably not gonna get you there.

– I think you need to, I’m gonna grab Haley over here and ask her to drop in some of those old drop salsa or hot sauce.

– It’s a real heat. Yeah, this one, I think it tastes like a sriracha, but it’s got a little bit of a kick, just not a ton.

– Right, not to change the subject there, but what’s the hottest wing you’ve ever had?

– I eat a hot salsa usually. I don’t eat a ton of hot salsas, I usually eat salsa. And there’s one that I can get in the Texas grocery stores that is kind of a fresh, homemade, roasted salsa. And it’s a habanero salsa, it’s very hot. And I pretty much put it on everything.

– Gal.

– So none of these are really in that kind of category of heat although I do think this one’s got a little bit of a bite.

– I’m excited for this one. I like the Nando’s normally, so.

– Yeah, that one’s really good and a lot of people think that one’s the hottest one. I don’t think it is, but a lot of people think it is. I think that this one, we could go a couple of different ways, but so what is, the question is really, what is kind of like your biggest operational priority for this year? Where’s it gonna be your focus area?

– Yeah.

– Which I think is tough, like there’s a lot of uncertainty out there right now, so things could change really rapidly.

– There is a lot of uncertainty, there’s a lot of things. I mean, look, company-wide, obviously for us, it’s always gonna be the same. It’s always about increasing sales, increasing the satisfaction, sales cures all.

– Yeah.

– I think if you’re talking about IT in particular, one of the things I’m very big on, well, there’s really two pieces to be honest. We mentioned one of them, such as using AI to interact with our data more, right? We have so much data at this point. There’s just everything, it’s almost too much, right? And what do we do with this data and what’s important and what’s not important and how are you gonna do it? So I think there’s a huge push to get that working, how do you really have an answer for that? I think technology-wise, we’re there, we can do it all. The other piece, and this is actually with Hot Seat directly, is we’re not fully utilizing the tools that we have. So you have all these great tools, these great sources, all these products that we use, we’re very much a buy versus build kind of environment. So we have a lot of these tools, a lot of them interact, they have a lot of features and we’re probably, there’s so many features that’s unused. And that’s probably across the board system-wide and we really wanna figure out a better way to utilize these.

– It’s the challenge in software in general, I think, not just software, but software and hardware that everybody has believed for so long, you just load it with feature, feature, feature, feature and people, they forget, they forget even how to use half of this stuff.

– Yeah, you don’t know what’s there. I mean, there’s, and even as an IT guy, I mean, I love, I’m glad that we’ve bought so much versus build because I’ve literally to the point where if I’m trying to figure out how to do something, Copilot and ChatGPT are my best friends and ’cause they’re going through the documentation and they’re looking up, I used, I was telling them as our POS, I’ve loaded all the documentation on a notebook LM.

– Wow.

– And so, when I’m trying to figure out how something, what, does this exist? Can I do something like this?

– So it’s actually a better help desk.

– It is, it’s become a very good help desk, right? And a lot of these stuff that the guides are there, the documents are there, it’s just, it’s hard to keep up with every feature from every product. And even our, you know, the pricing at a fourth or at any place else, you know, and they try, the good people to try to tell you what’s gonna be useful, but they only know a limited side and they know-

– Yeah, this much about what’s really going on.

– And so, a lot of these products have features that we probably should be using and could help our business that we just aren’t taking advantage of. So that is a massive focus on us right now.

– Well, I’ll tell you what, if you figure out a good way to solve that problem, I’d love to know because it is a plague I’ve seen in my entire career is, you know, the software is so feature rich and how can you help customers get the most out of it? And it’s really hard to do.

– And even if AI can help with the reaction, so I can ask it a question and get an answer, that still only takes care of part of it. There’s still a whole lot of features that I might not know or outside of me know to ask. And then I, you know, once I learn, I’m thinking, well, that could come in really handy.

– So one of the things I hope is actually gonna happen is that AI reduces the need for the features because the AI is using those features as a part of distilling it down to a simpler task.

– I think that could very much come in handy. I think AI already, today, a lot of those language models will give you different ways to do the same thing and different options. And so you can help figure it out. I think some of, you know, the latest stuff with AI is kind of the deep thought stuff where it, you know, you can ask it and it’s going through it a few times, rethinking it and trying to find the best way.

– Sometimes hallucinating.

– Sometimes hallucinating, but yeah. You know, I think it’s that, and you know, the weakness of AI, you kind of hinted at it just there, is it wants to give you an answer right or wrong. And so sometimes it’s just gonna make it up.

– Yeah, it does make it up.

– In fairness, that’s what helped us do too, so.

– Probably more than they don’t.

– Awfully. So I’ll take my chances.

– All right, we’ve got, let’s eat this last wing.

– That’s the one I’m excited for.

– This is that peri-peri, this is a good one.

– Ooh, a little smoky flavor to it. Yeah. The sauce is great. Obviously talking to you is great, but the wings were really good.

– The wings are really good. I’ve not, I mean, I’ve been eating a few.

– You’ve had a few, yeah.

– No.

– I’ll do the next interview just so I can eat them.

– They’re really good. So this one may be a little, maybe a little bit outside of the IT realm, but so the question is, what are the biggest shifts that you guys have made or you’ve made either in your business or to your model to kind of protect or grow profitability? What are the things that you’re doing that drive that the most?

– That’s a good question. Well, we’ve changed so much over the years and continue to change much. And by the way, that one did have a little kick to it. I gotta think, I just had some water. I’m thinking that has some kick.

– Good, it does. Some people think that’s the hottest one.

– Yeah, it gave me a little kick there, Dan. I’m happy about that. Or they’re not gonna answer a question with my tongue burning a little bit. So good.

– They have milk.

– Has anybody used it, by the way?

– No, not that I’ve seen.

– So, you know, the more probability to change it, that’s a hard question to answer ’cause you could answer it so many different ways. And sometimes, like I said, it’s just by getting most of the investment we’ve already made and really figuring out what that investment really was and what it can do. And better ways that we can use it. Some of it, again, is to, we talked about earlier about to meet the customer where they are. You know, I think that was a huge shift when we went to the digital world, from kiosks to order a table. We were very conscious that we are not gonna drive customer behavior, nor do we necessarily want to. The last thing people wanna do is go to an airport and then feel lost about how to get food.

– Yeah, waiting, waiting, you know.

– Correct, so we made a big effort to try to meet the customer where they are. We’ve tried to really help increase the profitable things. We’ve changed times our business models, how we’ve done it with partners, whether or not we’re a franchisee or a licensee, or how we’re doing it and how we bid on it.

– You must do both, I’m assuming you do both.

– Yeah, we’ve done it all and we have our own concepts. Like I said, so we’ve tapped at everything. We’ve taken on even a little retail.

– Wow.

– To try to meet the needs. So, you know, budgets are, in today’s environment, are always challenging and you gotta offset the rising cost of everything without passing too much on to the customer. But we have done a lot of things, again, but what can we get from the middle budget? Where can we make efficiencies? Where can we combine things? We talked about kitchens before, and again, AI is a good tool on that, where you can get AI, listed ingredients, the menu items, and try to consolidate the inventories we have so we don’t waste it.

– Have you tried to use it for any sort of broad-based optimization at an airport?

– I can’t say we have yet. We have talked about it, especially around the menus.

– I was gonna say, it’s gotta be coming, right?

– Especially around the menus and the recipes and the inventory, we’ve dabbled a little bit. Nothing formalized.

– Yeah, because if you’ve got central kitchens and you can distribute to more, then, you know.

– You know, I am a big believer, and I said this earlier, that we are in the crust of an AI revolution like we were with the internet in the late ’90s. I’ve been very much encouraging, on all levels, people to use different AI tools. We talk about the privacies and which is good and which not. We’ve kind of established some rules around it. I’ve seen some companies, I think this is a mistake, some companies have kind of tried to restrict which AI tools are allowed and which are not, and I think that’s like coming up a list of websites you could use in 1998, like it was impossible.

– It’s impossible.

– And it’s gonna change.

– It’s impossible.

– So, we focus a lot on how to use AI and encourage people to use their own, whatever they find.

– Use responsibility.

– Correct, use responsibility, but go ahead and explore, go ahead and try different things because it’s changing rapidly.

– Yeah, I mean, who knows what happens tomorrow? Somebody, there might be some tool that pops up that, yeah.

– Correct, and then people like yourselves and Fourth and other companies which are adding AI pieces to their existing tools and what comes out of that, and I think that’s the right thing. I mean, I think it will even up at some point, but yeah, you know, we’re on AOL Messenger and you know, we’re about to, you know, figure out how we’re gonna really start texting people.

– It’s gonna be interesting to see how rapidly it comes because, you know, one of the weird things about AI is that it’s unlike enterprise software. In the old days, we used to like, we’d code up all of our stuff, then we’d give it to you guys and roll it out and you got what you got, right? Hopefully it did what you wanted it to, at least close, but now you get it and it kinda doesn’t do everything because it’s gonna take time.

– Correct.

– Over that period of time, it’s in theory gonna get much, much better.

– Yeah, yeah, I agree. And a lot of that has been about building it, getting the infrastructure in there and understanding what we’re gonna, how we’re gonna do it and you’re right. I think it will change, I think it will constantly, I think if we had this conversation four years from now, maybe I’ll say, hey, I nailed that and a lot of us are like, well, I got that so wrong.

– Yeah, I just think it’ll be interesting to, and in some cases, which we don’t know, is when the AI begins to look at what it has available to it in your environment and helps you optimize, what is it gonna find?

– Yeah, I mean, I think that’s where we’re going. And then what that does to the business, what that does to the world, who knows?

– Yeah, who knows?

– Listen, I have arguments with my son all the time who’s very smart about, no, we both agree AI is gonna be a big shift, whether or not it’s for the better, for the worse, whether or not it increases or decreases.

– Some or both?

– Yeah, some or both, whether or not you need to put guardrails around it or not and what kind of guardrails. I think that’s an ongoing debate for people that are a lot smarter than me. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to figure out how to use AI to make me a better PowerPoint for presentations to get budgets.

– Well, that’s one, when you figure that out, I need to know what you got, ’cause I haven’t gotten a decent slide out of AI yet.

– Oh, you gotta go to, I don’t wanna be a plug on the thing, but Gamma.

– Is it good?

– Gamma’s pretty good.

– All right, I’ll try it.

– The only problem is, it actually, it’s great, it’s amazing, but when it gives you the PowerPoint, everything’s an image, so it’s hard to edit it in there, but yeah.

– I have to try that. I’ve tried a few different things.

– Gamma’s definitely the best.

– All right. Well, Todd, it was really a pleasure talking to you. I appreciate you sitting down and doing this.

– I appreciate the wings and the food.

– I’m sure they’ll give you more if you wanna.

– We’re gonna do this next year with some hotter sauces.

– Yeah, we need more heat next time. I agree with you. Thanks.

– Thanks, man.

– It was really a pleasure.

– Good luck.