AI Grows Up at the 2026 National Restaurant Association Show

This article first appeared in SmartBrief.   

Making data actionable

While the agentic restaurant session focused on infrastructure, the session “Data that leads: Turning restaurant signals into daily decisions,” featuring Black Rock Coffee Bar and Restaurant365, focused on execution at the operator level.

Jaclyn Nesemann, business intelligence senior manager of the 190-unit coffee chain with headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz., detailed the company’s transition away from reactive monthly financial reporting toward a weekly reporting cadence designed to help operators identify issues earlier.

Under the previous system, financial data often arrived weeks after operational problems had already developed, Nesemann said. By shifting toward weekly reporting and more consistent performance monitoring, the company was able to identify variances earlier and make adjustments faster.

The conversation focused less on the technology itself and more on how information is communicated and acted upon. Rather than just distributing reports, Nesemann emphasized simplifying the data and helping operators understand the operational drivers behind the numbers — why labor costs shifted, why food costs changed and what actions should follow.

“I’m not just telling them a number. I’m telling them a story,” Nesemann said. “There’s normally something, and there’s normally a reason, and if you’re on top of things, you can kind of pull that out of people and help them understand that context.”

Marc Cohen, solutions architect at Restaurant365, agreed. 

For any of you who have done this, there’s sort of that order of operation,” he said. “I find, you start to distill the why, and then they start asking better questions, then you know it’s working, right? Then they start answering the questions for themselves, then you know it’s really working.”

Emphasis was also placed on involving the right partners and people from the start to ensure long-term success, whether you’re building the technology internally or bringing in a vendor.

“I think the important part here is that your team is part of this process, right?” Cohen said. “You’re not just managing from the top down, and I also think figuring out where to manage these levels of information is critical. Not everything can come from corporate. Some of it has to be managed at a store level, at a GM level, and they’re part of this weekly process, right? You’re getting feedback from them on what they feel is important and how they can move the needle – that feedback is super critical.”

Read the full article at SmartBrief.