Industry
Consumer & Retail
2 pieces on The Craft of AI tagged with Consumer & Retail — across The Brief, the Failure Museum, and the Playbooks.
The Brief — 2 issues
Advantage Solutions Grew Profit 116% While Its Closest Competitor Shrank 10%. The Real Advantage Was Built Three Years Before the AI.
The commercial infrastructure of American retail — 60,000 people, 70 million labor hours a year — spent three years consolidating its systems, cleansing its data, and centralizing how work gets scheduled before letting AI touch any of it. The segment rebuilt first is the one whose margin turned.
Dave Peacock, Advantage Solutions Inc. · $3.5B gross / $3.0B net (FY2025)
Wingstop's AI Smart Kitchen Cuts Food Waste 34 Percent and Ticket Times in Half — and Just Did It at 2,586 Restaurants Simultaneously.
In ten months, Michael Skipworth shipped the AI Smart Kitchen to every domestic Wingstop. The system forecasts demand in 15-minute increments using more than 300 variables per store. Touchscreens replaced paper tickets that used to fall behind countertops. Speed of service during peak — which used to push past thirty minutes — holds under sixteen even on Super Bowl Sunday. Where Wingstop runs the stores itself, AUV is already running at $2.5 million on the path to $3 million.
Michael J. Skipworth, Wingstop Inc. · $696.9M (FY2025)
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