For the restaurant industry, 2020 was a year marked by rapid innovation and adaptation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the year, restrictions tightened and loosened across the country, forcing brands to adapt their business models at an unprecedented pace in order to survive. Now, in 2021, the industry’s focus is turned less toward adaptation and more toward improving operations and recapturing profits in the midst of supply issues, high third-party delivery fees, and staffing difficulties, which all strain the bottom line.

As a result, many chains have focused their energies on creating and maintaining online ordering platforms, introducing mobile applications, and incentivizing customers to return through customizable loyalty programs and targeted digital marketing campaigns. However, restaurants are now managing more channels than ever before, requiring a presence in drive thru, carry out, delivery, and online ordering, as well as in newly reopened dining rooms, making it even more challenging to manage these programs. While restaurants have turned to technology to streamline these initiatives, finding all the resources they need in one platform has traditionally been difficult, especially for small to mid-sized brands.

Just ask Justin Egan, chief marketing officer and co-founder at Wing It On!, a growing North Carolina-based quick-service chicken brand with eight brick-and-mortar locations across six states. Egan says that while the leaders of the brand—which first opened in 2011 and began franchising in 2014—knew its customer base was adopting online and mobile ordering, that technology was out of reach for smaller brands without deep enough pockets to develop it for themselves or to hire a vendor to build it. When they were finally able to introduce a mobile app in 2018, it was only able to list hours and locations and provide guests with photos of dishes.

“We decided we needed something more user friendly that could provide a branded Wing It On! experience and the functionality to not only manage digital orders, but that could also help us connect with our customers and drive digital revenue without requiring too much manual maintenance,” Egan says.

That’s when Wing It On! turned to Incentivio, an all-in-one digital platform that helps restaurants manage their marketing, branded mobile apps and web ordering, loyalty programs, delivery, gift cards, curbside pickup, and customer database. 

“Introducing online and mobile ordering that was fully integrated with our POS was really what drew us initially to Incentivio,” Egan says. “The platform is very robust and offers tons of great features for restaurants to leverage that would typically require integrating, paying for, and managing multiple platforms, databases, and vendors. We can manage our mobile and online ordering, loyalty programs, push notifications, rewards in one platform that also provides a machine learning driven marketing engine. It was a game changer for us at so many levels”

Rich Long, director of implementation at Incentivio, was previously an Incentivio customer in his role as director of IT for several different restaurants across the quick-service, fast-casual, and full-service segments. He says he knows firsthand just how cumbersome managing so many disparate systems can be.

“When you maintain multiple systems for your data, online and mobile ordering, loyalty programs, and more, your entire ecosystem is ripe for errors,” Long says. “This is often because if you change something in one place—say an item you offer in your online ordering system—you might forget to change it everywhere else. Having all these systems in one platform and a single database allows you to reduce errors and save both time and money, while also creating a single source of information so all your reports are integrated.” 

Egan says Incentivio makes managing the company’s loyalty program frictionless. Guests earn incentives based on their orders and actions, like referring friends, and each time the brand launches a new LTO, Incentivio makes it easy for Wing It On! to announce new offerings through both push notifications and email.  

“Incentivio has allowed us to create a digital experience that’s both convenient and easy for our fans and simple to manage for our company; our franchisees are often astonished at how much we can offer with this one system,” Egan says. “In fact, we’ve even seen candidates who passed on franchising with us in the past come back and sign franchise agreements with us because we use Incentivio.”

Not only has the system helped save Wing It On! time and generate sales through the built-in marketing tools, but the chain is now also using Incentivio’s new autonomous recommendation engine. This new suggestive upsell tool uses past data to understand which sides, desserts, and beverages are commonly ordered with center-of-the plate items and which items a guest already has in his or her cart to make smart recommendations that help restaurants generate incremental revenue and increase average check sizes. “Simply by turning this feature on, we’ve seen a 4 percent increase in digital revenue driven autonomously through the upsells engine—we didn’t have to lift a finger to start seeing results,” Egan says. 

“In 2020, the restaurant industry had to become lean,” Long says. “You can no longer have an IT department of 25 and an operations team three layers deep, so the more restaurants can simplify the better. By bringing all of these tools into one easy-to-use yet powerful platform, restaurants of all sizes have access to the technology they need to become more efficient, save time, and drive sales without a multi-million dollar IT budget.”

Long adds that just from the new upsell recommendations engine alone, some of Incentivio’s customers are generating more in automated incremental revenue each month that the cost of the entire Incentivio platform.  

“As an emerging brand that was actually thriving during the pandemic due to our digital presence, it was difficult to find technology partners that were also thriving and innovating,” Egan says. “We felt well positioned to have Incentivio as a partner during this time. They never dropped the ball, and that really stresses the importance of choosing the right vendor partners to grow with you through the thickest of times. Wing It On!’s future is bright, and we’re on trajectory to have 100 stores in the pipeline by 2024. We know Incentivio is able to quickly scale with us, and we’re excited to continue our relationship.”

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Businesses experienced the merits of virtual events first-hand, thanks to artificial intelligence.

Since the time coronavirus gripped our lives, artificial intelligence has played a key role in facilitating the work-from-home and also the leisure-from-home culture. From online meetings, virtual events, press releases, product launches, and client conferences,  AI made sure we stayed sane in the most uncertain times.

2020 saw a big shift in the way businesses work. In a way, businesses took the most hit and stole all the spotlight when technology proved to be the savior for not just businesses but also governments by helping everyone stay connected. Online events, conferences, and webinars continued to become increasingly popular with businesses and the general public rapidly adopting collaboration tools like Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc. 2020 brought the focus on online event platforms to organize, plan, and execute virtual meetings, exhibitions, and whatnot. Though this was an emergency last resort, it proved to be effective, more than traditional methods in some ways as it added value like cost savings, measurable ROI, and quick audience insights. These events also saw the overall audience experience improve drastically with several engagement interventions and immersive virtual 3D elements.

More Power To Artificial Intelligence

According to a market report by Grand View Research, the virtual events market worldwide stood at $77.98 billion in 2019 and grew at such a rapid rate in 2020 that it is expected to hit the mark of $404 billion by 2027. As the world is still being struck by the pandemic, several industries like IT, retail, healthcare, automotive, and education have actively transitioned to hosting virtual events. Activities like internal training, press releases, product launches, team meetings, etc. are taking the virtual route and it’s slowly becoming a norm rather than an exception.

With artificial intelligence driving virtual events, AI bots are facilitating virtual companionship for audiences, improved customer engagement, personalized experience, and increase in demand. For example, companies can use machine learning technology to observe and learn behavior patterns of engagement.

Virtual Events In The Future

Before COVID-19, around 40% of the total market spend was allotted to physical events. But as the global environment for businesses became increasingly challenging due to COVID-19, on-ground event spends saw a drastic decline as companies welcomed virtual events. Many businesses believe that events will continue to be a big part of their growth and about 80% of marketers claim that businesses are more supportive of online events because adoption of technology is no longer a barrier but a necessity.

As artificial intelligence continues to power virtual event platforms, companies are leveraging the advantage of data and analytics to add value to their work. Seeing ROI improving and leads getting generated in bigger numbers is resulting in better market presence and industry standing. The trajectory of the events industry suggests that virtual events are being perceived as a viable alternative for C-level executives as it saves them travel time and cost.

Another advantage of virtual events that are here to stay is accessibility. With platforms compatible with all devices, events can be experienced and hosted from anywhere. This opens up many opportunities for virtual event marketers and companies who have started to conduct internal events online. The healthcare industry and pharmaceutical industry are using virtual event platforms to host medical conferences that are used for knowledge sharing, networking sharing, training, and discussions.

Augmented reality, virtual reality, and intelligence AI-driven bots are extracting maximum data from virtual events which are proving to be a gold mine. This is making virtual events more streamlined, focused, targeted, and personalized to deliver experiences that are just perfect.

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As the ways we consume content multiply and change, media creators are hard-pressed to adapt their methods to take advantage. Short-form audio and video news is one growing but labor-intensive niche — and Agolo aims to help automate the process, pulling in the AP as a client and Microsoft,  Google and Tensility as investors.

Agolo is an AI startup focused on natural language processing; specifically, how to take a long article, like this one, and boil it down to its most important parts (assuming there are any). Summarization is the name of the process, as it is when you or I do it, and other bots and services do it, as well. Agolo’s claim is to be able to summarize quickly and accurately, producing something of a quality worthy of broadcast or official documentation. Its deal with the AP provides an interesting example of how this works, and why it isn’t as simple as picking a few representative sentences.

The AP is, of course, a huge news organization, and a fast-moving one. But its stories, while spare as a rule, are rarely concise enough to be read aloud by a virtual assistant when its user asks “what’s the big news this morning?” As a result, AP editors and writers manually put together scores or hundreds of short versions of stories every day specifically for audio consumption and other short-form contexts.

Because this isn’t a situation where creative input is necessarily required, and it must be done quickly and systematically, it’s a good fit for an AI agent trained in natural language. Even so, it isn’t as easy as it sounds, explained Agolo co-founder and CEO Sage Wohns.

“The way that we have things read to us is different from the way we read them. So the algorithm understanding that and reproducing it is important,” he said. And that’s without reckoning with the AP’s famous style guide.

“This is one of the most important points that we worked on with them,” Wohns said. “The AP has their style bible, and it’s a brick. We have a hybrid model that has algorithms pointed at each of those rules. We never want to change the language, but we can shorten the sentence.”

That’s a risk with algorithmic summarizing, of course: that in “summarizing” a sentence you change its meaning. That’s incredibly important in the news, where the difference between a simple statement of fact and an egregious error can easily be in a single word or phrase. So the system is careful to preserve meaning if not necessarily the exact wording.

While the AP may not be given, as I am, to circumlocutions, it may still be beneficial to shift things a bit, though. Agolo worked closely with the news organization to figure out what’s acceptable and what’s not. A simple example would be changing something like “Statement,” said the source to The source said “Statement.” That doesn’t save any space, but you get the idea: essentially lossless compression of language.

If the AP team can trust the algorithm to produce a well-worded summary that follows their rules and only takes a quick polish by an editor, they could serve and even grow the demand for short-form content. “The goal is to enable them to create more content than was humanly possible before,” said Wohns.

The investment from and collaboration with Google  falls along these lines as well, though not as laser-focused on turning news stories into sound bites.

“What we’re working on with them is making the web listenable,” said Wohns. “Right now you can ask Google a question, but it often doesn’t have an answer it can read back to you.”

It’s primarily a bid to extend the company’s Assistant product as it continues its combat with Alexa and Siri, but may also have the extremely desirable side effect of making the data Google indexes more accessible to blind users.

The scope of Google’s data (Agolo is probably now getting the full firehose of Google News, among other things) means that the AI model being used has to be lightweight and quick. Even if it takes only 10 seconds to summarize every article, that gets multiplied thousands of times in the complex workings of sorting and displaying news all over the world. So Agolo has been very focused on improving the performance of its models until they are able to turn things around very quickly and enable an essentially real-time summary service.

This has a secondary application in large enterprises and companies with large backlogs of data like documentation and analysis. Microsoft is a good example of this: After decades of running an immense software and services empire, the number of support docs, studies, how-tos and so on are likely choking its intranet and search may or may not be effective on such a corpus.

NLP-based agents are useful for summarizing, but part of that process is, in a way, understanding the content. So the agent should be able to produce a shorter version of something, but also tell you that it’s by this person (useful for attribution); it’s about this topic; it’s from this date range; it applies to these version numbers; its main findings are these; and so on and so forth.

Not all this information is useful in all cases, of course, but it sure is if you want to digest 30 years of internal documentation and be able to search and sort it efficiently. This is what Microsoft is using it for internally, and no doubt what it intends to apply it to as part of future product offerings or partnerships. (Semantic Scholar has applied a similar approach to journals and academic papers.)

It would also be helpful for, say, an investment bank analyst or other researcher, who can use Agolo’s timeline to assemble all the relevant documents in order, grouped by author or topic, with the salient information surfaced and glanceable. One pictures this as useful for Google News, as well, in browsing coverage of a specific event or developing story.

The new (undisclosed amount of) funding has Microsoft (M12 specifically) returning, with Google (Assistant Investment Group specifically) and Tensility Venture Partners joining for the first time. The cash will be used in the expected fashion of a growing startup: chasing sales and a few key hires.

“It’s about building out the go-to-market side, and the core NLP abilities of the team, specifically in New York and Cairo,” said Wohns. “Right now we’re about a 90% technical team, so we need to build out the sales side.”

Agolo’s service seems like a useful tool for many an application — anywhere you have to reduce a large amount of written content to a smaller amount. Certainly that’s common enough — but Agolo will need to prove that it can do so as non-destructively and accurately as it claims with a wide variety of data sets, and that this process contributes to the bottom line more than the time-tested method of hiring another intern or grad student to perform the drudgery.

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