TL;DR
- A drive-thru AI rollout across 50+ franchise locations follows four steps: System Buildup, Performance Optimization, Business Optimization and Rollout at Scale.
- Franchisees come along when they join early, go first as volunteers and see results in their own stores.
- Franchisees keep control of menus, limited-time offers and regional offers, while the brand holds its standards.
- Hi Auto’s pilot can be live in about 8 weeks, with 90-120 days from pilot to scale. Hi Auto reports 93%+ completion and 96% accuracy across ~1,000 stores.
An owner raises a hand halfway through a slide about AI. Two questions come out: what happens to my crew, and what happens to my margin?
Those two questions decide a drive-thru AI rollout across 50+ franchise locations. Head office cannot mandate adoption in a franchise system, so the rollout moves at the speed of trust. Franchise flexibility answers the control question, and it becomes real when owners see it working in their own stores.
Bojangles has been through this with its franchisees. Its CEO summed up where the trust landed in one line:
“99% of the franchises that have tried it, have stuck with it.”
Jose Armario, CEO, Bojangles. QSR webinar “AI Order Taker That Works: The Bojangles Model”, July 2025. Watch the clip
This guide walks through the steps in plain language, and what you do about the people at each one.
Why do rollouts across 50+ locations stall?
A franchise rollout slows down when owners are watching their margins, crews are wondering about their jobs, and head office has no way to force adoption. Four patterns come up again and again, and each one comes from how the rollout is planned.
Treating AI as plug-and-play. An AI Order Taker is tuned to your menu, your regional offers and your real operating conditions. Skip that work and doubt shows up early in the pilot store. Doubt travels fast through a franchise group.
Not preparing staff or guests. A crew member who hears about the system on the morning it goes live will be unsettled. A regular guest who meets a new voice at the speaker without warning may be confused. A short, honest briefing before go-live handles both.
Not redeploying the time the system saves. If freed-up hours disappear into a spreadsheet, crews draw their own conclusions. If the time moves into hospitality and food quality, crews can see what the system is for.
Not asking how vendor numbers were measured, or at what scale. A result from a small pilot tells you little about what you will see across 50 locations. Ask any vendor for completion and accuracy together, as an average across all live stores rather than the best location or the best day. That is what reliability at scale means in practice. For reference, Hi Auto reports 93%+ completion and 96% accuracy across ~1,000 stores.
What does a drive-thru AI rollout look like in four steps?
Hi Auto’s roadmap has four steps. Each one has work for the technology team and work for you.
Before step one, check three things at every pilot store: a POS system, a drive-thru audio system and reliable internet.
Step 1: System Buildup
In plain terms, this is getting the system connected and set up for your brand.
What the technology team does: They connect the AI Order Taker to your POS and your drive-thru audio system. Through POS integration, menu and price changes sync automatically. The brand’s scripts and voice are set up before a single guest hears the system. The product page shows how it fits together, and the partners page lists the systems Hi Auto works with.
What you do: Confirm the pilot store is ready. Find your first volunteer owner. Brief your franchise business consultants, so they are not hearing about this for the first time when an owner calls them with questions.
Step 2: Performance Optimization
In plain terms, this is the tuning step.
What the technology team does: The system goes live at the pilot store and the team watches it closely, tuning it to your menu and your lane. Completion and accuracy are tracked together, because a high completion rate with poor accuracy just means fast mistakes. Hi Auto’s pilot can be live in about 8 weeks.
What you do: This is your listening phase. Spend time in the pilot store and talk to the crew. Note what works and where there is friction. What you learn here becomes the starting point for your next owner conversation.
Step 3: Business Optimization
In plain terms, this is where results turn into a business case.
What the technology team does: Attention shifts from whether the system works to what it does for the business. Hi Auto reports 3-8 labor hours saved per store per day, and the four numbers to watch are completion, accuracy, average ticket and upsell consistency. The dashboard also surfaces store-level signals such as early closes, delivery-only periods and missed orders.
What you do: Build the case you will take to the next owners, using real numbers from a real store in your system. Decide how the time the system frees up will be used, for example on hospitality and food quality.
Step 4: Rollout at Scale
In plain terms, this is copying what worked in your pilot stores to the rest of the system, in waves.
What the technology team does: They repeat the proven setup at new locations. Menu and price changes keep syncing automatically with the POS, and brand-level script updates go out across all stores quickly. Hi Auto’s path from pilot to scale typically runs 90-120 days.
What you do: Manage the order of the waves, support each owner through onboarding, and keep score. The stores that went first become your reference points.
How do you bring franchisees in before you bring in the system?
Many rollouts treat owner buy-in as an announcement. The order works better the other way round: make the people decision first and the technology decision second.
Make franchisees contributors. Bojangles’ CIO described the approach it took:
“I think it really has been a wonderfully collaborative effort here at Bojangles because we’ve never treated this as an IT project. This has been a Bojangles project from day one all-inclusive including our franchise partners and our franchise business consultants and the team that helps franchises be successful.”
Richard Del Valle, CIO, Bojangles. QSR webinar on the Bojangles model, July 2025. Watch the clip
Franchise business consultants are the people owners already trust. Bring them in before the first store goes live and let them shape the pilot. They know the kitchens and the margins, and they can carry the story back in language owners recognise.
Start with volunteers. Invite the owners who are curious, or who find staffing hard, to go first. Nobody is mandated. An owner who raised a hand wants it to work.
Owners will ask about risk. When the AI is not confident, human backup steps in during the live conversation, so the order still gets finished correctly. Hi Auto’s product page describes this as a real-time human-in-the-loop backup.
Let early stores talk to the next group. Once your volunteers have live results, connect them with the next owners for a plain conversation: what surprised you, what changed at the drive-thru, what would you do differently. Owners trust other owners.
How do you prepare crews and guests?
Order taking asks one person to handle the headset, the food, the cash and the window at once. When a new system arrives at that station, crews reasonably ask what it means for their jobs. Bojangles’ CEO remembered the early days:
“At the beginning of this venture I think we were all a little surprised at how nervous the team members were about potentially losing their jobs… and I don’t think It took more than 48 hours for them to go, ‘Love BoLinda. She’s my best friend.'”
Jose Armario, CEO, Bojangles. QSR webinar on the Bojangles model, July 2025. Watch the clip
A few things help before go-live:
- Talk to the crew first. Explain what the system does at the order point and what it leaves to people.
- Be direct about the freed-up time. Say where it will go, and point it at hospitality and food quality.
- Warn regular guests. A short, friendly line about the new voice at the speaker avoids surprises. Hi Auto detects English and Spanish automatically.
Hiring and keeping crews is a challenge across the industry. The glossary page on employee turnover in QSR gives useful background.
What do franchisees keep control of?
A common worry is whether adopting the system means handing menu control to a vendor. The short answer is no. Franchisees adjust their own menus, limited-time offers and regional offers. Menu and price changes sync automatically with the POS, so there is no extra step for the owner.
The brand keeps its standards. It tunes scripts, voice and upsells, and pushes updates across all stores quickly. Each side controls the part that belongs to it.
Neil Pathak owns Star Enterprises, a Bojangles franchisee. He described the effect in his own restaurants:
“You could see immediately the day we put Bolinda in our restaurants, we would see those stress levels come down and we would see the guest experience get better.”
Neil Pathak, Owner, Star Enterprises, a Bojangles franchisee. Hi Auto customer video, 2025. Watch the clip
That is an owner describing his own stores, and it is the kind of account that persuades the next owner.
How do you expand in waves and keep score?
Keep the first wave small enough to support every store well. Then let the results set the pace. Once the first stores are live and producing real numbers, your role changes from selling an idea to sharing evidence.
Before the next wave commits, put the numbers in front of those owners. Track the four measures Hi Auto reports:
- Completion: the share of orders finished, read together with accuracy.
- Accuracy: the share of orders that come out right. Track both as averages across all live stores.
- Average ticket: whether consistent suggestions are moving check size.
- Upsell consistency: whether the suggestion happens on every order.
The dashboard adds store-level signals such as early closes, delivery-only periods and missed orders. Those give you a fact-based conversation with an owner about how a store is running.
24/7/365 support covers live stores, so an owner with a question at 2 a.m. has a direct line to the Hi Auto team.
Adoption is earned store by store
A franchise rollout is won in the first store, then the second, then every store after that. An owner who has seen the system work in their own drive-thru makes a better case for the next owner than any announcement, deck or mandate.
Some owners will wait for a later wave. That is fine. Give each store the support to become a reference the next group can visit.
Call to action
If you are designing a pilot or checking whether your system is ready to scale, talk to the Hi Auto team about what a pilot looks like for your network. Then read the Buyer’s Guide, a checklist for comparing vendors, before you commit.
Open items for Hi Auto
- Please confirm the spelling of Richard Del Valle’s name, and that the Armario and Del Valle quotes in this guide are still cleared for use.
- Please confirm the four roadmap step names (System Buildup, Performance Optimization, Business Optimization, Rollout at Scale) may be published as written.
- Please confirm the current partner list before we point readers to the partners page for supported integrations.