Who sells $1 Billion of Ads to Restaurants?

This week on The Digital Restaurant, I’m joined by a new co-host — Alex, an AI avatar — as we break down five headlines showing how delivery, automation, and AI are shaping the next wave of restaurant operations:

01:10 – Olive Garden’s off-premise engine is humming
Uber Direct integration, buy-one-take-one offers, and nearly 7% same-store sales growth from delivery alone

05:25 – Yum China rolls out Q Smartt
 A voice-activated wearable assistant for managers, designed to surface operational insights in real time

11:05 – GPT failed at report building
 QSR’s Mary Pillow Thompson spent a weekend trying to automate daily ops. The issue wasn’t the model—it was the lack of orchestration

13:30 – DoorDash acquires Symbiosis for $175M
 A strategic bet on local commerce advertising, with closed-loop attribution from ad to order

17:45 – Coco raises $80M to scale delivery bots
 Semi-autonomous, human-guided, and aiming for 10,000 units deployed by 2026

Quote of the week:
 “Coco isn’t replacing humans — they’re redeploying them smarter.”

Full episode: https://thedigitalrestaurant.buzzsprout.com

#restauranttech #AI #offpremise #DoorDash #OliveGarden #CocoRobotics #YumChina #InvisibleTechnologies

Shoutouts:
 Zach Rash, Joey Simons, Sam Altman, Ryan Graves, Mary Pillow Thompson, Alex (AI co-host)

Chapters

• 0:00 TDR 6-23-25
• 1:06 Q1 - Olive Garden playing a strong hand for off prem success
• 5:21 Q2 Yum China launch Q Smart
• 11:00 Q3- Does GPT really save restaurant owners time in compiling reports?
• 13:25 Q4. Doordash acquires a third company!
• 17:43 Q5 - Coco gets $80M in funding