CMO Roundtable with Jonathan Muhtar, Chief Marketing Officer of Captain D's

Ai in marketing

“In what ways are you using AI technology in the marketing department to enhance your data analysis of trends, performance, and more?” Jonathan Muhtar Chief Marketing Officer Captain D’s We’ve found AI can be incredibly useful, but we’re also careful about where and how we use it. We’re using AI to help our team work fast-er, uncover insights more quickly, and spend more time on the work that really requires experience and judgment.

A lot of our AI applications are focused on improving the guest experience. In our online ordering platform, AI helps power suggestive selling and analyzes historical order data to provide more accurate order-ready times. We also use it to forecast weekly sales based on historical trends, which helps us make better decisions around promotions, inventory, and staffing.

We’re also using AI to help us listen to what our guests are telling us. We receive feedback from customer surveys, Google, Yelp, and other re-view platforms every day. AI helps us sift through all that information, identify common themes, and spot opportunities much faster than we could manually.

Some of the ways we use AI aren’t customer facing at all. For example, our print partner uses AI to compare printer proofs against the original artwork we submit. It catches small discrepancies before anything goes to press, which saves time, money, and a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth.

Product innovation

One area where AI has become a great brainstorming partner is product innovation. We use it to analyze menu data, consumer behavior, and emerging flavor trends to get a sense of where the market is headed. It helps explore ideas, pressure test flavor combinations, and think through different menu formats.

We also use it to help validate preparation approaches and to think through how recipes may scale and perform opera-tionally. That said, we’re careful not to confuse direction with answers. AI can tell you what’s trending, but it can’t tell you what’s right for your brand.

If everyone is using the same tools and looking at the same data, there’s a good chance they’ll come up with similar ideas. That’s why every insight still gets filtered through our brand strategy, our talented culinary team, and real-world testing with guests. At the end of the day, AI is another tool in the toolbox.

It helps us move faster and make better-informed decisions, but the best marketing and the best menu ideas still come from our people who know the brand and understand our customer.