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What AI? Chili's spends big on WiFi and tablets instead of tokens

What AI? Chili's spends big on WiFi and tablets instead of tokens

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Alex Bitter

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A man wearing a white shirt and baseball cap opens the front door of a Chili's restaurant on a sunny day as a white car sits parked outside the front entrance.

Chili's has focused more on upgrading handheld ordering systems and software than AI, Brinker International CIO Chris Caldwell told Business Insider.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Chris Caldwell is more focused on tablets these days than AI tokens.

The chief information officer of Chili's parent company, Brinker International, has spent his 2½ years in the role figuring out how to overhaul WiFi systems at restaurants and replace thousands of handheld devices that waitstaff use to take customers' orders, he told Business Insider.

Many restaurants are adding AI to their operations. At Starbucks and Burger King, for instance, AI agents are listening to drive-thru orders and fetching recipes for baristas.

Chili's, meanwhile, has largely stayed away from such uses. Instead, it's turned around its same-store sales in part by focusing on food quality, service, and, in Caldwell's case, replacing outdated tech systems.

"I'm not chasing AI to go, 'Guys, Anthropic just released a new LLM, and we need to use it because it's cool,'" he said.

From singing robots to new iPads

Brinker International CIO Chris Caldwell poses for a photo while wearing a dress shirt with a light-blue pattern.

Caldwell worked at KFC owner Yum! Brands before joining Brinker International in 2024. 

Brinker International

Before Caldwell arrived in 2024, Chili's was experimenting with lots of flashy technology, such as robots that could bus tables and sing Happy Birthday to diners.

As Caldwell talked to his new colleagues, though, he got the impression that Chili's needed to invest in more basic tech upgrades. Some restaurants didn't have enough ordering tablets, he said. When a tablet was available, Chili's system didn't reliably send customers' orders to the kitchen, resulting in slower service.

"The first thing I heard was that we're doing a lot of state-of-the-art things, but the foundational systems were really having some challenges," he said.

To fix these problems, Caldwell and colleagues invested in fixes such as 23,000 iPads for taking orders. It's also redesigning the software on those tablets to make taking orders as easy as using any other app — and help new employees train faster, he said.

Under Caldwell, Chili's has also replaced WiFi access points in all 1,200 of its US restaurants and made sure each had enough bandwidth so that ordering and other in-store operations weren't slowed down, he said.

Caldwell uses AI to brainstorm

It's not that Caldwell and Chili's are avoiding AI altogether.

Corporate employees at Brinker have access to Microsoft's Copilot — a tool that's made them "more efficient on a day-to-day basis," Caldwell said.

For example, Caldwell said that he bounces ideas off of AI. He described a conversation with the chatbot that helped him think through the implications of using payment devices stationed at Chili's tables instead of having customers flag down waitstaff to pay.

"I had probably a 30-minute brainstorming session with AI this morning just to make sure I'm thinking about that holistically," he said.

Brinker is also looking at about half a dozen uses of AI that could be more directly integrated into restaurant operations, such as estimating when customers' online orders will be ready for pick-up.

"Does it make life easier for our teams or customers?" he said. "That's the lens that we're using, for the most part."

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Alex Bitter

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.

Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501.