At the 2025 National Restaurant Association Show, in a breezy but insight-packed session titled “Practical Applications of AI, from Ideation to Delivery,” Dine Brands Global executives Chris Padilla, Vice President, Brand Technology, and Jason Suarez, Vice President Digital, Data Services and Digital Engineering, pulled back the curtain on how AI is being used inside two of America’s most recognizable restaurant chains: Applebee’s and IHOP.
Their approach? Practical, scrappy, and grounded in real-world use cases that enhance — not overwhelm — teams and budgets.
A Focus on Data
Dine Brands is starting its AI journey by focusing on data-driven insights and encouraging teams to “play around” with the tools already at their fingertips. It’s not about moonshots. It’s about making everyday tasks smarter and more scalable.
They shared that for the company’s culinary team, generative AI is already in use: “We submit to Copilot our existing supply chain and we use it to generate new ideas for our chefs to iterate.” The goal? To accelerate ideation while staying grounded in operational reality.
They also pointed to a guest-facing innovation: “We’ve deployed an AI recommendation engine with Google on our web and mobile ordering platforms. We move it to our tablets and provide prompts to the server, empowering a new server to be just as effective as a veteran.”
Potential Use Cases
And that’s just the start. Padilla and Suarez outlined a range of use cases across the enterprise: improving order accuracy with computer vision, guiding portion control, refining marketing messages, forecasting inventory and labor, and supporting franchisees with AI-powered financial guidance.
Rather than overwhelming the audience with abstract frameworks, Padilla and Suarez walked through practical examples and shared lessons learned. As a guiding principle, they invoked a quote from Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal.”
