Latest / From Kitchen to C-Suite™ / PULSE! Today’s Hotel, Restaurant & Bar Industry News Deep Dive | 08/14/2026 Episode
Transcript
- Brad Peters: Welcome to Pulse, today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news, a deep dive from HRB Universal, navigating your industry, with insights from leaders from AI agents actively taking over, you know, restaurant purchasing, to a staggering, I mean, a thirty-nine point six billion dollar surge in high-stakes hospitality MA, the industry is just violently pivoting from survival mode. straight into high conviction growth. ⁓ it is a massive pivot. I mean, honestly, if you are sitting in the executive suite right now or, you know, running a multi unit operation, you can feel it. Yeah. The ground beneath you isn't just shifting, it's completely fracturing. Totally. We're seeing a fundamental rewrite of well how a hospitality brand is valued, how it operates behind the scenes, and most importantly, what the guest is actually demanding when they walk through your doors. Exactly. You really cannot operate on the twenty twenty three playbook anymore. I mean the friction points have entirely relocated. Welcome to Pulse Today's Hotel, Restaurant, and Bar Industry News Deep Dive brought to you by HRB Universal. We are delivering the critical updates, trend analyses, and operational intelligence you need to stay ahead in hospitality. And our mission today is to, well, move entirely beyond the headlines. We're going to break down not just the what, but the why and exactly how you need to adapt your operations right now to protect your margins and ⁓ drive sustainable loyalty in a market that is just moving incredibly fast. Right. when we look at the landscape for this twenty twenty-six, you know, twenty twenty-seven cycle, what really stands out to me is how interconnected everything has become. ⁓ absolutely. Like you really can't understand the corporate executive shakeups we're seeing without understanding the new AI technology that's driving operational efficiency. Right. And in turn, you can't understand why that specific technology is even necessary without looking at the rapidly changing ⁓ Highly volatile consumer demand. Yep. It all ties together. Because that's what's forcing operators to carry infinitely more complex inventory. It all starts with the guest. So let's unpack this macro shift happening in consumer demand right now. Let's do it. Specifically, we're gonna look at the C-Store and snack aisles for a minute. I know we focus on hotel, restaurant, and bar, but this C-Store stuff is the perfect fluff to reveal massive menu implications for everyone else. It's the canary in the coal mine, really. Exactly. So The phrase circulating in the industry right now is a biological audit, which I mean it sounds intense, maybe even a little clinical. Right. But it perfectly describes the reality on the ground. We are seeing a monumental leap in protein demand. Seventy percent of consumers now actively demand increased protein in their diets. Wow. If you look back just four years ago, that number was sitting at fifty nine percent. It is a phenomenal acceleration. And to understand the why behind that leap, you really have to look squarely at the GLP one factor. But weight loss drugs. Exactly. The mainstreaming of drugs like semaglutide and tearzepatide, it has fundamentally disrupted the biological landscape of your consumer. Right. We are no longer just looking at a you know a casual dieter who wants to cut a few calories or skip dessert. Yeah, the rules have changed. We are dealing with a highly disciplined label reading consumer. Whose actual gastrointestinal signaling has been physically altered. Which is wild to think about from an operational standpoint. It is, because these medications, ⁓ they slow gastric emptying, they change how the brain actually receives satiety signals. So when a consumer on these medications gets hungry, they literally cannot physically consume. A massive low value meal. Right, they get sick. Exactly. So they are actively prioritizing nutrient density specifically because, well, a primary clinical concern with rapid weight loss is muscle degradation. So they need the protein to save their muscle mass. Yeah. That is the crux of it. Protein isn't just a fitness fad for gym goers anymore. Not at It's become a clinical necessity for a massive segment of the general population. I mean, they aren't just grabbing a bag of traditional potato chips at the lobby bar because it's the cheapest thing there. Right. The internal logic of what constitutes value in the mind of your guest has fundamentally changed. The old metric was price per ounce. The new metric is nutrient density per dollar. And if you are a food and beverage director, ⁓ that completely changes how you have to design your menus and stock your grab and go. Precisely. If you are operating in this space right now, it requires a ⁓ a bifurcated approach to your portfolio. Okay, break that down for me. Sure. So you have to understand that functional protein is the anchor nutrient right now. It is the baseline requirement that drives repeat traffic. But you are serving two very distinct masters and you need different tools for each. Right. First, you have your animal-based anchors. Look at what Canagra is doing with the Slim Jim Cheese Mode. It offers 10 grams of protein by just, you know, combining meat and cheese. Classic combo. Exactly. Now, why does that work? Canagra's internal research shows this is one of the most common. Comforting, satiating combinations for a mobile consumer. This is your volume driver. Okay. Yeah. It provides satiety on the go at a lower price point. It hits the protein macro, but it relies on familiar legacy comfort. It's the stable floor of the operation. It's accessible, people know it, they trust it, and it fills them up without requiring them to, you know, think too hard about it. Exactly. But that alone doesn't build a robust margin. It feels like you need a barbell strategy here. Like you have the Cheap, reliable, animal based volume on one end. Right. But you need something on the other end of the barbell to actually drive profitability and you basically just leave the murky middle behind entirely. That is exactly the right analogy. The other side of that barbell is your plant based trade ups. Okay. This is where you capture that highly intentional GLP one demographic and you know, the flexitarian market. Take a product like Hippie's Protein Crunch. ⁓ I've seen those. Yeah, they are offering eight grams of pea protein per one ounce serving. Now, pea protein is functionally different from a marketing perspective than meat and cheese. Right. It's got a different vibe. Exactly. It caters directly to the 41% of consumers who are actively reading labels to support very specific health goals. What is crucial for you to understand as an operator Is that a clean label, whole ingredient format allows for a deliberate psychological trade-up. Interesting. So they feel good about spending more. Exactly. The guest feels they are making an optimized choice, and that strong ingredient story justifies a significantly higher MSRP. This is your margin, Triver. Got it. You leverage these high margin, highly intentional items. To offset the tighter margins on your volume heavy animal protein anchors. Okay, so you have your familiar comfort anchors keeping the volume moving and your premium intentional snacks padding the bottom line. Yep, that's the foundation. But establishing that functional floor is just the cost of entry today, where it gets incredibly complex and frankly, where you either win or lose the modern consumer is the ceiling. Absolutely. You need sensory innovation that actually gets people excited to open a menu or scan a QR code at their table. And the buzzword absolutely dominating the industry right now is swicy. ⁓ man. Swicy is everywhere. Sweet and spicy. It is entirely dominating the product pipeline right now. And the numbers back it up. Yep. Ready to eat sweet and spicy snacks have seen a 16% compound growth rate over the last three years alone. That's huge. Data Essential flagged it as a top-tier trend. And within that massive swicy umbrella, Mango habanero is just exploding. ⁓ yeah. We are talking about 129% menu penetration growth over a four-year period. You look at Angie's Boom Chicka Pop, capitalizing on this by launching a mango habanero popcorn. Right. It's brilliant because it layers the experience. You get the bright, juicy fruit notes first, then the heat builds on the back of the palate. And because it's popcorn, it's inherently high in fiber, which Checks another one of those functional nutritional boxes we were just talking about. It is a master class in formulation because, like you said, it satisfies both the nutritional mandate and the sensory mandate simultaneously. Yeah. And you know, the reason swissy works so well on a biological level is the contrast. What do you mean? Well, the capsaicin in the spice triggers a mild pain response, which releases endorphins. While the sugar immediately soothes it, it creates a literal neurological loop. That encourages the consumer to take another bite. Wow, so it's literally hacking their brain. Pretty much. But Swiss isn't the only sensory frontier you need to monitor. We also have to look at what formulators are calling the sour gap. ⁓ the sour gap is fascinating to me because it really highlights a massive generational divide in palate preference. He really does. The data shows that younger consumers like Gen Z and millennials. They are five times more likely to prefer extreme sour profiles than boomers. Five times. Right. But here is the inefficiency in the market. According to internal research from Haribo, forty one percent of consumers say they struggle to find the perfect sour spot. Yep. It seems like the market currently offers two extremes. It's either a mild tartness that doesn't deliver the punch they want, or it's an extreme novelty acid burn that just strips your tongue and has zero actual flavor profile beneath it. Right. It's just pain. And it's a massive market inefficiency. But the chemistry of sour is actually quite difficult to balance at scale. Why is that? Well, you are dealing with malic and citric acids, and those can actually degrade the texture of a gummy over time if they aren't coated properly. ⁓ interesting. I didn't realize it physically broke the product down. Yeah, it's a huge formulation challenge. Harry Bow's response to this gap was to launch sour sodas. They designed these specifically to hit that elusive sour spot. By pairing a measured sour intensity with recognizable fruity flavors, but they added a crucial element which is multi texturality. Okay, explain that. So it has a soft center, but with a slightly crunchy exterior coating. And that need for multi textural experiences, that brings us directly to the third major sensory trend, global textures. ⁓ man. The Dubai chocolate phenomenon. Exactly. If you have been on any social media platform in the last six months, you have seen that. It's unavoidable. It's milk chocolate, a rich pistachio cream filling, and it is layered with finely shredded Kataiki pastry to give it this incredible, just resonant crunch. Yeah, that crunch is everything. It went so viral that major players had to react. ⁓ Just to capture some of that halo effect. It was a massive viral hit, absolutely. But if you look at the velocity data now, its momentum is cooling. Right. What Dubai Chocolate actually proved wasn't that pistachio is the flavor of the future forever. Right. It proved that consumers have a massive unmet appetite for global textures. They want that audible crunch, that complex mouthfeel, and they crave the discovery aspect of a foreign ingredient. Yeah, that sense of adventure. Exactly. But as these hyper-sweet trends begin to cool, the data shows consumers pivoting that exact same desire toward global savory trends. Which brings us to the Rujiamo. I'm obsessed with this trajectory. It is a perfect evolution of the trend. Tell them what it is. So the Rujiamo is often referred to as the Chinese hamburger. It originates from the Shaanxi region and it is a 2,000-year-old street food. Right. It utilizes a very specific crispy layered pan-baked flatbread. And it's stuffed with intensely braised meat. Sounds amazing. It really is. And it satisfies that exact same consumer craving for intense textural contrast and global discovery, but it delivers it in a savory, umami rich format that feels like a substantial meal rather than a novelty dessert. Okay. I have to push back here. Yeah. Because if I am listening to this and I'm running a fifty unit restaurant group or, you know, a regional chain of boutique hotels. This sounds exhausting. It took a lot to manage. Is chasing viral trends like Dubai chocolate or ancient Chinese hamburgers just a recipe for dead inventory? I mean, it feels like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. It really can be. You scramble to source Katafi pastry, you train your kitchen staff, you update your marketing, and right when you finally get the walk in full of the product, the internet moves on to the next shiny thing. It feels like a massive capital risk. That is a very real risk. And frankly, if you overindex on any single viral trend. You will end up with dead capital sitting on your shelves. And that is exactly the actionable takeaway for you as a hospitality or retail leader. You have to master portfolio rebalancing. You cannot build your core business model on catching lightning. Okay, so how do we balance it? You use the functional protein, the Slim Jims, the hippies, as your stable, predictable floor to drive consistent daily volume. Got it. Then you use these strategic limited time offers, the spicy popcorns, the multi textural sour candies, the global savory items like a Rugiama slider, strictly as your high margin ceiling. So you treat them as transient by design. Exactly. You have to constantly rotate these discovery destination items. You avoid oversaturating your supply chain and fading trends. You treat that top fifteen to twenty percent of your portfolio as a dynamic, ever changing discovery zone. Because you're selling a feeling. You are selling the experience of newness just as much as the product itself. That makes total sense. You bring them in the door with the excitement and FOMO of discovery, right? But you keep them coming back on Tuesday morning with the reliability of functional nutrition. Exactly. But let's be totally honest about the operational reality here. Listening to us describe this barbell strategy, I mean managing this level of sensory volatility. Constantly rotating twenty percent of your SKUs every quarter. It's a nightmare. Tracking the granular margin differences on pea protein versus mango habinero while balancing the shelf life of a braised pork limited time offer. Doing that on a legacy back office spreadsheet is impossible. It really is. It's a recipe for blown food costs and burned out general managers. It is entirely unsustainable for a human manager to calculate those variables manually in real time. Right. The sheer volume of data points required to manage this level of sensory volatility and rapid ski year rotation, it literally breaks legacy systems. I've seen it having. To survive this consumer shift, operators have to digitize and automate the back office, which is the perfect transition into the next massive operational shift we are seeing, the leap to agentic commerce. Yes. Let's ground this in the reality of the tech stack, because the adoption numbers we are seeing are staggering. They are moving so fast. Right now. 69% of hospitality operators are actively using or piloting AI for reporting and analytics. Yep. And eighty-eight percent of them say it saves them hours of time every single week. But we need to be very clear about definitions here because we aren't just talking about a you know a customer facing chat bot that answers questions about your operating hours or parking. Yeah, this is way beyond We are talking about agentic commerce. Yeah. This is a monumental shift where AI moves from just recommending actions. To actually executing transactions autonomously. Autonomously being the keyword. Exactly. We are seeing platforms like Craftable rolling out their crafty model in restaurants, and we are seeing infrastructure players like spreedily integrating AI into the actual payment spaces with new protocols like ACP and UCP. If you are an operator, the PL impact here is what you need to focus on. Give me the number. Among the operators who are already utilizing these advanced AI systems, 61% report a measurable reduction in their food costs. And 62% report a reduction in their labor costs. That is massive margin protection. It is. But to understand exactly how that is possible, you have to understand the fundamental difference between generic AI and purpose-built AI. Okay, yeah. Clarify that for people. Generic AI, like a standard conversational model you might use on your laptop, it reasons about the hospitality industry in the abstract. Right. It knows what a theoretical restaurant is, it knows what a theoretical food cost formula looks like. But a purpose built, agentic model like Crafty is wrapped securely in your specific proprietary operational data. That does your business. Exactly. It doesn't live in the abstract. It runs on the live data from your point of sale systems, your real-time labor schedules, your specific vendor invoices, and the live inventory sitting in your walk-in cooler right this second. Right. So if I ask a generic AI why my food cost is high, it gives me a textbook list of five things to check, like ⁓ check Portion control or monitor for theft. Which isn't very helpful when you're busy. Exactly. Yeah. But if I ask a purpose built AI, it's not giving me a textbook definition. It's looking at the exact price I paid for a case of avocados yesterday versus last week. Exactly. It provides actionable conversational insights based on ground truth. I mean, a general manager today spends hours pulling three different reports, sales from the POS Invoices from accounting, inventory from the back office, and trying to merge them in Excel to find a variance. Usually at two in the morning. Exactly. With purpose-built AI, that same GM can just ask the system in plain conversational language, why is our chocolate cake costing twice as much to produce at the downtown location compared to the suburban location? That just knows. And the AI will instantly cross-reference the data and tell you the downtown location has been buying cocoa powder from a secondary vendor. At a forty percent markup because the primary vendor has been out of stock for three weeks. Wow. Or a marketing director can ask which of our swissy limited time offers generated the highest net profit over the past twelve months? That level of instant visibility is incredible for course correction. But you used the term agentic action earlier. The defining feature of agentic commerce isn't just answering the question, is it? No, it goes further. It's the AI actually doing the work. That is the threshold we are crossing right now. The AI acts as a digital agent on your behalf. A GM doesn't just ask about past costs. They can ask Crafty to prep next week's food order. ⁓ that's huge. The AI will analyze historical depletion rates, factor in the upcoming weather forecasts and local events, and actually draft a purchase order. Wow. And it drafts that order against the live real-time vendor catalogs utilizing up to the minute pricing and dynamic pack sizes. That saves so much time. Or imagine a beverage director. They could upload a photo from a notepad or a PDF of a new cocktail idea they saw at a trade show. The AI will ingest that image, break down the ingredients, match them to the live inventory currently sitting in your bar, and draft a fully costed, scalable recipe in seconds. Okay, let me stop you right there, because if I'm a seasoned operator, my alarm bells are ringing loudly. I hear you. How on earth do we trust this? If the AI is suddenly placing orders with my vendors and managing the delicate balance of my PL. How does a jam know they aren't being led off a financial cliff by an AI hallucination? It's a huge concern. I mean, what if the algorithm misinterprets a pack size and orders 500 cases of mango habanero popcorn instead of five hundred individual bags? Who pays that invoice? The restaurant or the software company? Trust is the absolute critical hurdle for the adoption of agentic commerce. And the industry solution to this is that the AI must unequivocally show the work. Show the work. Okay. It cannot operate as a black box. It cannot just spit out a final purchase order or a vague conclusion like your food cost looks high and expect you to blindly execute it. Right. The platform must return the underlying mathematical logic. If Crafty runs an investigation into your margins, it queries the database and shows you the exact path it took. Walk me through what that looks like. It will literally say your theoretical food cost based on recipes and sales is twenty eight point four percent. Your actual food costs based on physical inventory and invoices is running at thirty-one point nine percent. Therefore you have a three point five point gap. ⁓ I see. And then it highlights exactly which ingredients are driving that gap. It provides the heavy lifting and the path forward, but the human manager remains the final decision reviewer. ⁓ that is a brilliant way to frame it. You transition your management team from being data excavators, digging through spreadsheets to find the problem, into decision reviewers who simply approve or adjust the AI's fully researched proposal. Precisely. You are elevating your managers to act like executives. Furthermore, the architecture of these enterprise systems is designed with strict read-only transparency. What does that mean in practice? It means the AI agent can analyze your historical database to find patterns, but it cannot alter or delete your historical financial data. It's a safeguard. Okay. That covers the operational side, but what about the payment side? You mentioned Spreedly and these new payment protocols earlier. Yes. If an AI is acting as an agent, say, a customer's personal AI assistant is negotiating with a restaurant's AI to book a private dining room and pay a deposit. How does that transaction actually happen securely? This is where we get into protocols like ACP, the authenticated commerce protocol, and UCP, the universal commerce protocol. Right. When AI agents are initiating transactions on behalf of consumers, merchants have a massive liability issue. You cannot have AI bots passing raw credit card numbers back and forth across the internet. ⁓ God, no. It would be a PCI compliance nightmare. Exactly. So merchants must utilize what the industry calls smart vaulting. Walk me through exactly how smart vaulting works. Essentially, smart vaulting allows a merchant to tokenize and store a customer's payment data securely in an agnostic vault. Okay. When the customer's AI agent wants to execute a transaction with the restaurant's AI, It uses a secure token, not the actual card data. ⁓ got it. The vault authenticates the token, verifies the rules set by the consumer like spending limits or preferred payment methods, and then processes the transaction. So the data never leaks. Exactly. This ensures that the hospitality business remains the official merchant of record. They retain liability control, they retain the customer data, and they don't get disintermediated by a third party tech platform. That's vital. It is. The ultimate actionable takeaway for you as an operator looking at your 2027 tech stack is this. You must upgrade to purpose-built models that prioritize read-only transparency for your operations, real-time vendor variance tracking, and secure tokenized smart vaulting for agent-driven execution. It's essentially like hiring a hyper-competent invisible assistant who never sleeps, knows the real-time commodity price of every single onion in your walk-in. And can instantly process secure payments. That's a great way to put it. But here is the reality checker. Technology, no matter how advanced, does not implement itself. No, it doesn't. It requires human beings to lead it, to force the adoption, and to shape the corporate culture around it. And that brings us to the human element. What does this macro shift in consumer taste and this massive leap in AI capability mean for the people actually running the show? It changes everything. That leads us directly into our final area of focus. Operational strategy. Executive shakeups, and the new era of high conviction MA. This is where the rubber meets the road. All of these trends collide in the boardroom. We are currently witnessing major structural realignments in the C-suite across the industry as companies desperately try to balance this new AI-driven algorithmic efficiency with the deeply human element of hospitality and brand building. Let's look at the headlines because the casualties of this transition are already piling up. Celsius Holdings, the energy drink giant. Just went through a major executive shakeup. Yeah, that was huge news. They reported an eleven point seven percent sales decrease in their namesake brand in the second quarter. Following that drop, their chief operating officer, Eric Hansen, is out. Yep. And they didn't just replace him, they created a brand new role, Chief Business Transformation Officer. Tony Gilfoy stepped into that role specifically with a mandate to lead supply chain operations and force AI adoption across the enterprise. It's a huge pivot for them. Meanwhile, over at Ollipop. You see a completely different yet related structural shift. They recently passed a staggering one point eight five billion dollar valuation and are pushing half a billion in sales. Incredible growth. Right. But their founder, Ben Goodwin, is stepping aside from the daily operational grind to move into a purely innovation focused role. To handle the scale, they brought in Christian Petinho Webb, the former head of Electrolyte, as the new CEO. Smart move. And then you look at a brand like First Watch in the restaurant space, they are taking a totally different angle on leadership, actively highlighting their female leadership pipeline, like CFO Ashley Weisser, and heavily promoting a follow-the-sun operational culture that prioritizes employee mental health and provides backup childcare for their workforce. These three examples, you know, they seem disconnected on the surface, but they're all trying to answer the exact same existential corporate question. Which is how do you scale massively utilizing data and AI? Without losing the soul and the human spark of the brand. The Celsius situation is a prime, highly visible warning about the extreme danger of overrationalization. John Fieldley, the CEO of Celsius, was actually very candid with investors about what went wrong. He admitted that they went too deep on SKU optimization. What does that actually mean behind the scenes? It means they let the algorithm dictate the brand. In the pursuit of supply chain efficiency, Which is often driven by the very data and AI systems we were just praising. Their operations team likely looked at the spreadsheet and said, These five niche flavors only account for eight percent of our sales, but they cause thirty percent of our supply chain headaches. Cut them. So they did. They did. They cut too many of their smaller, innovative, exclusive flavors just to streamline production. They optimize the fun right out of the brand. They listen to the spreadsheet instead of the customer. Exactly. And in doing so, they lost those crucial high margin destination drivers that kept their core consumers engaged and excited to check the cooler every week. They forgot the barbell strategy we discussed in the snack aisle. Right, you need the ceiling. Yes. Efficiency cannot override human nuance and brand excitement. The moment a brand becomes purely a functional commodity, you lose your pricing power. And Ollipop is clearly trying to avoid that exact trap by formally separating the rolls. Yep. They brought in a seasoned, ruthless CPG executive to handle the operational scaling and the AI integrations while the founder is insulated from the spreadsheet so he can focus entirely on sensory innovation and keeping the brand culturally relevant. It's the perfect division of labor. And First Watch is proving the final piece of the puzzle. Operational excellence at the unit level has to be built on a foundation of a supported, healthy workforce. ⁓ one hundred percent. You can have the best AI in the world drafting your prep lists, but if your kitchen manager is burned out and quits because they don't have childcare, the restaurant still fails. Which brings us to the MA data. When you look at how buyers are valuing these companies, the data is just wild. It's fascinating. In the first half of 2026, deal value in the travel, leisure, and hospitality sector surged by 106.8% to $39.6 billion. But here's the crazy part. The actual volume of deals, the sheer number of transactions taking place, fell by seven point six percent. That specific disconnect. A drop in transaction volume, but a massive doubling of deal value, that is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the current market reality. How so? It proves that institutional buyers and private equity firms are no longer interested in small speculative plays. They are pursuing bigger, higher conviction deals. They are no longer just buying physical real estate or acquiring a loose collection of restaurant units to flip them. Right. It's not a real estate game anymore. No. They are buying fully integrated loyalty ecosystems, they are buying rich customer data, they are buying absolute distribution control, and they are buying the pricing power that comes with owning a dominant brand. Aaron It makes me think of the real estate market, honestly. It's like the difference between buying an empty plot of land where you have to run the plumbing, lay the foundation, and build everything from scratch versus Paying a massive premium to buy a fully furnished turnkey smart home where everything is deeply integrated. Exactly. The security system works, the climate control is automated, and you could just turn the key on day one and live in it. Investors don't want the empty lot anymore. They want the ecosystem, the structured data, and the integrated customer loyalty already built in and humming. That's a perfect way to put it. Look at Fertita Entertainment's seventeen point six billion dollar acquisition of Caesars Entertainment. That wasn't just a real estate play buying hotel towers on the Vegas Strip. Not at all. That was a calculated move to merge physical resort assets with massive, high-margin gaming economics and an incredibly rich, decades-deep customer data ecosystem. That is the definitive case study of this new era of high-conviction MA. When you buy Caesars, you are buying the algorithmic knowledge of exactly what thousands of guests want. when they want it and what price they're willing to pay for it. It's it's valuable. It is. The mandate for leadership right now, whether you are a single unit operator trying to survive the year or a massive holding company looking for an acquisition target is absolutely clear. You must ruthlessly balance AI driven efficiency with a culture of genuine hospitality. Right. Do not let your algorithms cut your exclusive flavors or your limited time offers so aggressively that you lose your destination status as Celsius learned the hard way. For investors and operators alike, your focus must be heavily weighted on building rate integrity, encouraging repeatable guest behavior, and using tools like agentic AI to turn your raw customer data into measurable, scalable operating outcomes. It's an incredibly delicate balancing act. You need the cold, ruthless efficiency of the algorithm in your back office to protect your margins from inflation and supply chain shocks, but you absolutely require the warm human touch, the swicy popcorn, the new sensory menu innovations. The supported happy staff to actually keep the guests walking through the front door. It is the ultimate synthesis. The winners in the twenty twenty six-2027 cycle will be the operators who successfully merge functional health, sensory intensity, and absolute digitized operational discipline. Which leaves us with a massive and slightly intimidating concept to think about. We've spent today talking about AI, acting as an agent, negotiating recipes. Drafting purchase orders and helping your human managers become high level decision reviewers instead of exhausted data excavators. Yep. But as agentic commerce truly takes over the industry infrastructure, what happens when the AI representing a restaurant's purchasing system starts off autonomously negotiating wholesale prices with the AI representing a massive food distributor? Now that is a wild thought. Right. Are we rapidly entering an era where hospitality back offices simply become invisible, algorithm to algorithm battlegrounds? Fighting over pennies on a case of tomatoes at the speed of light? It's something you seriously need to think about as you evaluate your own tech stack and prepare your brand for the reality of the 2027 cycle. That wraps up today's edition of Pulse. Before you get back to your Florida executive suite, make sure to check out the other powerful shows in the HRB Universal Network. Gitchen to C Suite, your definitive roadmap for advancing hospitality careers from entry level up to executive leadership. Keep OMEs in place, culture first leadership, and organizational strategies. Focused on safety, compliance, and building top-tier workplace culture. Three is Bessuchin Vishou, the recipe for results podcast extra fast, high impact extras packed with operational tactics and actionable solutions, 86ing the bad habits, cutting out systemic operational flaws, bad leadership habits, and inefficient practices across hotels, bars, and restaurants. This podcast is supported by the generous commitment of our sponsors, and we extend a special thank you to HRB Universal. Their dedication to providing comprehensive resources and promoting excellence is key to empowering professionals across the culinary and hospitality industries. We also want to acknowledge the Plate and Poor Collective Equity Partner Program. This initiative exemplifies a true commitment to fostering shared success and equitable growth within the food and beverage sector, helping entrepreneurs build a more inclusive and thriving future. 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