Chili's CIO Chris Caldwell spent 2.5 years overhauling WiFi and buying 23,000 iPads instead of chasing AI agents. Same-store sales turned around on basic tech fixes.
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turned around its same-store sales in part by focusing on food quality, service, and, in Caldwell's case, replacing outdated tech systems.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.
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.
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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