Don't Push or Pull → Pitch: Atul Sood on How Multi-Unit Brands Make Technology Stick

Hey everybody, welcome to today's webinar. I'm so excited to have Atul Sood on. Atul has a long career in multi-location brands across the world, including McDonald's, Kitchen United, and now Atul is the fractional Chief Business Officer working with a ton of companies to navigate things like growth, partnerships, adoption, and transparently

That last one's the one that we're here to talk to him about today. Adoption of technology at multi-location brands, especially ones that reach huge scale. So Atul, welcome. Before we dive into it, I'd love for you to give maybe the two minute intro on your background and how you came to be where you are today.

Yeah, absolutely. Great to be here, great to be a friend of Harmonyze overall. Love what you guys are doing with the company. So I got my entrance into the restaurant industry about 12 years ago. As Gary mentioned, I joined McDonald's, I ended up leading global food delivery partnerships for the company, which was a lot of fun.

I gained 25 pounds at McDonald's, so that was probably less fun. But, I'm a big fan of McDonald's. I think it's a great company, I love the food as, as was evidenced by my weight gain. I went on from there to a company called Kitchen United. We were in the Ghost kitchen space, providing restaurants infrastructure to scale through delivery and takeout. And in that capacity as Chief Business Officer, I dealt with a lot of franchise brands from Wendy's to Chick-fil-A, to others. And, feel like I got a reasonably good understanding of how they leverage and deploy technology. So I hope to be of some help to anybody listening to this webinar. As Gary mentioned, I currently work with a number of restaurant technology companies, serving franchise brands. So I have some experience now on the sell side as it were, trying to get our technology platforms and solutions deployed across multi-unit franchisees and multi-unit brands. You know, the reality is there are challenges, there are opportunities, and happy to get into it.

Thank you Gary.

Yeah. I'm excited. Well, I guess before we get into the modern challenges and opportunities, which you talked about. I'd like to start maybe early on in your career, right? Back then when you were working McDonald's and, kitchen and all these, you said infrastructure, right?

Infrastructure, I think nowadays is maybe not entirely but heavily, heavily, technology based. So what did that look like early in your career to roll out technology across that kind of scale?

You know, I think in general what I saw let's say 12 years ago, was I saw a very, push-based approach to technology adoption. The corporate sponsor,

Oftentimes an individual like me, who came from the technology world. I was based in San Francisco, would evaluate different technology products and solutions. The corporate parent would evaluate and choose one. And then, uh, through aggressive push, it would be deployed at franchisees essentially whether or not they liked the solution, whether or not they would use the solution, whether or not the cost implications of the solution were something that were palatable to them. And it was a very, kind of mandated approach of you will use this technology tool. I think that's shifted

Time, over the last 12 years. I think there's, you know, at, at places like McDonald's, there's always a technology counsel.

So they're franchisee leaders who are involved in that technology council, who obviously get to voice their vote, and their concerns and their suggestions as to which technology providers they would use. But the decision was really taken by the corporate with minimal, I would say almost lip service, appreciation of the franchisees needs. And that was, always something I think that was lacking in the way technology was deployed, and I think influenced the adoption of that technology, and definitely the utilization of that and the impact that it had across the system.

Interesting. So I, I think there's two things that I heard there, right? There was, first was A, whether they used it or not, which is crazy, and B, you started hinting at this idea of, well, they started pulling in that council. And maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but it sounds like that probably made things a bit better and a bit more palatable and successful.

But before we get into that, you know, how did you define success back then? Because if they weren't using it, how did you say create the successful thing right now?

Yeah, unfortunately, it was a metric that was dodgy at best. So I'll give you an example of good success, and then, counter that with kind of what was regular success? So good success, at McDonald's we launched Apple Pay. And, it was the first restaurant rollout of Apple Pay. It was about 11 years ago, and it was deployed in weeks, not months. It was remarkable, it was seamless. Franchisees were up and running, and we started accepting Apple Pay and made transactions happen seamlessly through it. So that was good. It was forced utilization, right?

The other aspect of it though, was that success was largely defined by whether or not it was rolled out, adopt was irrelevant. It was, did we press go?

Did we go live? And if we went live, whether it was an employee training and management system, a customer facing loyalty system, reward system, and I've seen this across brands, I'm not just talking about McDonald's. It was just whether or not somebody hit you know, hit go live. And if it went live and deployed, then that was success.

I think the world of the CTO has changed in the last 12 years, and has become a lot more rigorous and, metrics driven. And I think there are better indicators of success now, and better feedback loops you know, even pre-AI, better feedback loops to see, whether this adoption is really driving impact to the business.

But a lot happens in a decade plus, right? So I think we're in a much better state today.

What does that look like now? I completely agree that right now almost every time we work with a business, a deployment is pegged to some top line, bottom line metric or something like that, right? Where it's actionable in their, P&L. How does it look now where a CTO's initiative is tied to a field reality and it's not go, no go, but it actually represents adoption?

Yeah, well, I would say, primarily it's through better and more effective metric tracking. With a software feedback loop as well through, surveys of franchisees but, dashboards have gotten a lot better. There are, the kind of cascading ability off those dashboards to, both look, because the, this happens at, different levels of the ladder, right?

There's obviously the individual franchisee and then their franchise groups. So the Chief Operating Officer, or Chief Technology Officer franchise group needs to understand how the different units are performing across the group, needs to report back to a senior director of ops within the corporate, that reports the VP, that reports to the CEO. And there are all these different staggered levels of reporting, that are now, I would say almost mandatory in any tool you deploy

That's intended to have a, franchise wide impact. That, allows people to be much more measured, and then do the tweaks necessary to make sure that the software that's deployed is having the impact necessary. Furthermore, look, there's always been the approach of doing pilots to test before you deploy, across the entire ecosystem. But, I think we are seeing that franchisors and franchisees are much more rigorous in those pilot stages, really evaluating the data, sharing that data with other franchisees as part of a sales effort to pitch them on what the new product is that they're gonna be asked to use. And that type of pitch process or collaborative engagement to help franchisees learn in advance of the deployment, has really I think, gotten a lot better over the last decade or so. So it feels, and I've talked to many of my franchisee friends about this, it feels, more collaborative, I would say, today than it did 10, 15 years ago.

And it sounds like that's two things. It sounds like A) pilots are more rigorous and there's more of rather than a what you were saying was a push mechanism, maybe it's something more of a pitch mechanism where there's the business case is built and then it's slowly rolled out to the franchisees, after proving success and with rationale rather than a, you know, just brute force. But also that second fold of just more visibility, right?

Like a better collection of data, better understanding of data, of how to evaluate it and tie it back. So my question from there is why are things still failing? Right? I mean, you know, naturally, I forget the statistic, but like, you know, some crazy percent of 80, 90% plus AI pilots have gone nowhere, right?

And you still hear about these initiatives that stall out, or franchisees are, you know, they have the pitch, they understand that it's higher ROI but they just don't want to for some other contextual reason. I just am curious to hear from you why things are still failing in 2026.

I'm personally not that surprised that things are failing. I'm also a little bit of a Luddite. I'm a late adopter, not an early adopter. So, you know, new technology is hard, it's a pain in the ass. There's a lot to do in a restaurant. It is, oftentimes just challenging to, consider a new piece of technology to layer into your process.

You have to train a ton of people. You gotta, translate languages sometimes, and a lot is lost in the translation. And technology adoption takes time, right? So, only when it is proven, are people really going to apply the time and effort it takes to implement. And, they're gonna have to be told by their peers,

They're gonna have to be told by their managers. That we're driving results and here are the results. And then, it will be implemented to the largest extent or the desired hopes of management. So I would say it's not, it's not necessarily that technology projects fail 80 to 90% of the time. I would say 80 to 90% of the time it takes longer than expected to achieve the results desired. So if you roll out a new AI tool, you might roll it out in 2026, but the advantages and the benefits might not start to be seen till late 2027, and that's okay.

You'd like to accelerate as much as possible through educations and training. But I really like the way you said it's pitch instead of push. It is pitch instead of push and, that's the way it should be. And you know, the other aspect of this that we haven't touched on, it should also be pull instead of push, right? Franchisees, large groups are often approached. I know for the voice AI world that we're kind of on the precipice off right now. There are a lot of franchisee groups that made the move first into voice AI through the drive-through. And then they pulled that, or they are pulling that into the larger corporate organization. So it should be pull and pitch.

Do you think that the bar's higher now? I think that we're moving away from an age where a brand could say, well, you know, this is the best technology can do, right? And I'm thinking about, you know, a hyper-custom version of Salesforce or whatever it might be.

Whereas, you know, this represents our process at McDonald's and this is the best it's gonna be. And I think what you said before, was that there's now this massive amount of context for each location that matters, right? And the, the language, the rollout, their staff, their market, whatever it is that is context for that location.

Now there's an expectation for technology to be able to handle that context. And, and that's just part of being in the AI world where processing vast amounts of unstructured data is near free, right? It's like, well, if they can do that, then we, the expectation is that any new technology match that bar. So, you know, if you start pulling on that thread is.

Is it the expectation from a franchisee, from a technology vendor before they start pulling it, or the expectation from a franchisee of the pitch that they hear from a brand, is that now higher? And now we should be pushing ourselves in order to make anything successful? Or is it purely, this is an incremental ROI and therefore there will be uptake from the franchisee?

I think what we should be pushing ourselves to do is make fewer things successful. There's a lot of noise in the system. There are a lot of technology vendors out there pitching a lot of stuff. And that's great. I represent a bunch of technology vendors and everybody thinks that their invention or product is the best thing since the Big Mac, and often it's not. And the challenge for CTOs, at corporates is to identify the three to five things every year that will move the needle, and ignore the rest. And part of the sales guy in me hates that I just said that, but it's true.

There's a lot of noise out there and CTOs need to be overly disciplined in filtering, before they start exposing or before they do the pitch and the push. They need to filter really aggressively so that they're only exposing their ecosystem to the stuff that is gonna be most meaningful and most impactful right now. And, that's key for any technology leadership and operational leadership, and senior leadership in any of the big brands that I know are out there.

Agreed, and there's two parts to that and I, I wanna ask you about the second one, right? The first is, you know, the unit economics need to make sense, right? If I deploy this technology to that franchisee, it's going to increase whatever, but wait. I think a big part of what you were saying in the, you know, the earlier parts of this conversation was that uptake is or rollout is hard, right?

The idea that even if you have something great, and even if you might have a successful pitch for the franchisee, there might not be uptake, in which case the ROI is lost because you fail at rolling it out. Right? Or ease of implementation, I'll call it. Right. How, how do technology leaders today, from your understanding.

Try to understand that crystal ball of is this implementation going to be successful or not? When you're talking about a really complex, you know, web of thousands of business owners that need to take this thing.

You gotta do a staggered rollout. I mean, you, you gotta really pay attention to the subset of your franchisees who you pick for a pilot. Not all of them should just be like at, at McDonald's. One of the things that we were benefited by and hampered by we had a technology council that was made up by leaders who were based in Silicon Valley.

Hmm.

Those, those guys are always gonna be the cutting edge. They live in the area. So you should have a portfolio of franchisees that span the gamut of not just geography, but technology understanding and fluency. And, there should be Luddites, like

Yes.

That board. Um. And so the pilots are really important to get the feedback and understand where, the sticking points are, and then just do a staggered rollout after that. But the pilot phase needs to have a lot of scrutiny. It needs to have, the opportunity for franchisees to make their voice heard and for the corporate to really listen to that voice. In the corporate side, kind of the director, senior manager, senior director level. That synthesizes that information, presents it to the, SVP or VP level in, IT people. And then use that data to decide what the stack rank of priority is. 'cause you can have three to five pilots, five to seven pilots, seven to 10 pilots going concurrently. And then you can use that pilot initiative to decide from the seven to 10, what are the three that we're gonna roll out this year.

Interesting. I think there's something there that never thought about and you actually made me think to, you know, college statistics, which is, you know, a throwback here, but we used to do experiment design, right? And this idea of, you know, you have this normal distribution of.

Personalities in this case almost, right? Or you know, tech adoption or size or whatever it might be. And everybody, you know, myself included, knows that when you're setting up a pilot, you want to have representative set whatever percentage that might be, but you wanna make sure that it's representative of the entire.

Distribution, not just the high tech performers or the low or the Luddites But I think what I've never thought about before is that you're saying that that doesn't just extend to the pilot. It also extends to each phase of rollout where if you're doing 200 at a time, it's actually not enough to say, great, our pilot successful, and we're gonna start with the 200 forward-leaning.

You actually want a representative set in each one of those cohorts so that you're anticipating the challenges of the next 200. Is that right?

I agree. Yeah. You phrased it better than I would've, but yeah, that's dead on.

So I guess, you know, as these people are rolling it out, right, technology's changing as it's being rolled out. I guess how do you as an organization, as a brand, right. How do brands think about maintaining control of technology as it's evolving, while rolling it out, while also juggling other initiatives?

And I guess what does a good culture of a, you know, a technology organization at one of these big brands look like when they have. So many things to juggle and are juggling internal building versus buying external software and having those all, you know, working in synchronicity, I guess.

How does that all interplay?

Yeah. Well, first of all, you've made me think I think a great guest for a future webinar would be Leon, who's CTO at Dave's Hot Chicken. Um, 'cause I think he's doing an incredible job of it, um, uh, within his organization. Um, but I think the key to it is communication, consistent, frequent, and comprehensive communication between the corporate and key stakeholders, across as many franchisees as possible. And definitely this representative set that we just mentioned. And having that communication, because look, franchisees, get overwhelmed. There's a lot of day-to-day pressure on just having consistent operations and trying to hit the numbers that everybody's trying to hit.

A lot of times, This is just stuff that extends the workday. And without the communication of why it's important, how it's important, what the unit economics that it's gonna drive are, it's not gonna get the attention of the franchisee of the right people in the franchisee ecosystem to impact the right people in the deploy. Pipeline to have the results that are desired. And there are many different stages. 'cause at the end of the day, it's often a low level person that needs to use the technology, whereas the high level person is making the decision to deploy it. And that there's a breakdown in communication between the high and the low, which is why, as you mentioned, a lot of projects fail. So I would say communication is the key,

I know we're getting at time here. I do wanna ask one question, A lot of this conversation has been about what a brand can do well from a technology perspective, from a culture perspective, from a pilot and rollout design perspective, things that are within their control. I'm curious for, companies like me, vendors, technology providers.

What are things that. Companies like us can do to preempt those needs and make sure that our pilots are, and the technology we're building is successfully piloted, rolled out, and is matching these needs and layering into this culture that you're describing of communication. What can we get ahead of preempt and to be better partners?

Well, one, uh, I mean, for you and Harmonyze in particular, the value to all of the, constituent stakeholders in the franchisor franchisee dynamic is so abundantly evident. Um, that I don't think you're, I, I think it's a matter of, able to have the conversation versus, the outcome of the conversation, I would guess if you have it, is gonna be positive because the value add of the solution is so clear. Now for the average person, or the average company, I would say it's important to, make sure you can clearly articulate. This should be one of the top three to five priorities off the CTO, over and above and at the expense of another priority. Because otherwise it's just not gonna, it's just not gonna happen. I think, you know, for Harmonyze, if I were to, apply my external mind to it, the reason it should be the. Three priorities is because it allows other priorities in the months and years ahead to actually happen. And without the platform, you might lose out on deploying other stuff that is gonna be impactful to your business.

So this is, kind of a very clear infrastructure play. But for other people, why should this, and it's not like. Does the problem keep the CTO up at night or the CEO up at night? That's not the thing. It's, does the solution move the needle enough to be relevant in today's age?

Being able to clearly articulate that is terribly important.

I love that

I.

Aul. This was awesome. I feel like every time we chat I learn a little bit. Now this conversation's probably learned a whole lot about, that and about my own brand, which is crazy. Appreciate you making the time. I can't wait for the next chat.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me on. I don't know the last time I wore a, collared shirt at home. So you made me dress up today,

Happy to be a forcing function.

Appreciate

Yeah. That's awesome. Happy to, I mean, always gonna collar shirt. So happy to pull you in my direction.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, man.

Thank you for having me, Gary.