Bill Kerr: In the fast-casual restaurant industry, the boundaries between human and machine labor are being rapidly redrawn. Tasks once done by hand—like taking orders, prepping food, and scheduling shifts—are increasingly handled by software, sensors, and self-service kiosks. These changes matter not just because they alter workflows, but because they redefine the roles, skills, and career paths available in one of the country’s largest frontline industries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, limited-service restaurants employ more than 5 million people—many of them young, part-time, and from historically underrepresented groups. As digital systems take on more of the work, staffing ratios are falling, job descriptions are changing, and the core experience of both working in and dining at a restaurant is being reshaped. For companies that have long sold hospitality as part of the product, that shift raises a critical question: How do you design a service model where technology adds value without erasing what makes the experience feel human—for customers and workers alike?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work: podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. I’m joined in-studio by my faculty colleague, Chris Stanton, who teaches the Managing the Future of Work MBA course, and Steph So. She’s growth officer at fast-casual food company Shake Shack. Steph, an HBS graduate, is on campus for the debut of an MFW case study on Shake Shack’s digital strategy. We’ll talk about Shake Shack’s post-Covid digital evolution—balancing the efficiencies of kiosks and apps with face-to-face interactions. We’ll look at how the company experimented and learned from early adopters. And we’ll consider their options as they planned for personalization, increased automation, and AI. We’ll also ponder where the fast-casual industry is headed as the pace of technological change picks up. Chris and Steph, welcome to the podcast.

Steph So: Thanks for having us.

Chris Stanton: Thanks, Bill.

Kerr: Steph, why don’t you tell us a bit about your career before you came to Shake Shack and what’s your role in the company?

So: Currently, I’m the chief growth officer at Shake Shack. I oversee digital experience, consumer insights and analytics, our culinary team, culinary product development, as well as our digital product and user experience teams. Prior to Shake Shack, I actually was an HBS graduate of the class of 2007. I thought I was going to go into retail or some sort of consumer career after HBS. I ended up doing a little bit of consulting at Bain & Company and then spent some time at big companies like Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, trying to learn a little bit about digital marketing and how all of that might apply to the customer experience. And then I joined Shake Shack about five and a half years ago and have enjoyed kind of building the digital experience within Shake Shack.

Kerr: I’m sure most of our listeners would know chief growth officer, but that basically means you’re in charge of the revenue line and getting it to slope upwards, is that the main goal?

So: That’s correct. I think the biggest piece that is growing at Shake Shack is the digital footprint as well as the way we’re growing our media footprint. So paid media, which in some organizations sits within a chief marketing officer, at Shake Shack sits within growth, because we look at it primarily as a channel to grow traffic into our restaurants and we’re using primarily digital media channels to do so.

Kerr: Shake Shack has some distinctive vibes as a business. Can you tell us a bit about its operations, its culture? Or what makes it distinctive, separate?

So: The vibe is very much set by Danny Meyer, who is our company’s founder. He has a very important theory of enlightened hospitality, where he wrote an incredible book around how you put your employees first and everything else will follow, thereafter. So the priority at Shake Shack within the company has always been the employee experience, ensuring that employees kind of get to see out their best potential. And Danny’s philosophy is that that should make the experience great for customers.

Kerr: Well, that’s going to be wonderful for us to pick up on as today goes. Chris, we have the Managing Future of Work elective course for MBAs. Tell us where this case sits in the arc of the course.

Stanton: So the Managing Future of Work elective is a class that is really focused on lots of interactions between digitization and roles of employees, their well-being, whether automation and digitization is going to displace them or augment them. And increasingly, the Managing Future of Work class is also going to focus or does focus on the role of leaders and driving that transformation and making decisions that will impact employees. And so this is the very last class that is thinking about automation technologies and digitization from a capstone perspective and thinking about the choices that Steph and her team ended up making with respect to the rollout of kiosks and the rollout of other digital types of products through their organization and really highlights the question of whether you can effectively provide good jobs to frontline or hospitality-related employees and also drive automation solutions and drive digital growth at the same time.

Kerr: So, Steph, let’s go back to the labor force. When you’re in the quick service restaurant business, labor is critical—and you already mentioned how for Shake Shack, it’s part of what you view as the distinctiveness of the of the business. Tell us about that workforce strategy. Like, how do you recruit people? How do you manage to reduce the turnover of employees, kind of build that long-term bond?

So: Yeah. One of the unique things about Shake Shack is that from day one, a team member is cross-trained. So you are never working simply one station. We expect a team member to be able to work every station, from front of house, back of house, the cash wrap, the prep steps. And this extends even to our corporate office. So every support center employee, including myself, when I started, works at three restaurants, different locations, in order to really understand what that experience is like. You could see how cross-trained employees can be really, really valuable when you’re facing a huge kitchen rush or somebody calls out, you can kind of redeploy labor to all the different stations within a restaurant. Our workforce, as you can imagine, is a lot of folks in their first job. So I think one of the things that we find really interesting about hospitality is the barrier to entry is very low. We view ourselves as a place that can train people all the way from team member to restaurant manager, area director, all the way through our ops leadership organization. You can keep gaining responsibilities and then, ultimately, learn how to run a restaurant one day, which is in many ways an invaluable skill for just understanding how a P&L will work, how supply chain can affect a single location, and, ultimately, if you’re great at it, you can run a couple of locations.

Kerr: It would strike me that if someone is with you for a long time, that can be a really good thing, because you made a lot of upfront investments, but then you get that redeployment that you were describing and, maybe, happiness over. But if somebody churns very quickly out of the workforce, then you spend a lot of time training relative to the time that they were doing it. So is that right, that you have to have a model that has lower turnover to make that feasible?

So: It’s ideal, but as we know with restaurant work, it isn’t the case. You have high turnover in most restaurants. I think what we view is giving people exposure to lots of stations, making every day as unboring as possible. Today you might be on cash, tomorrow you might be on grill, the next day, we’re going to put you on fry. It allows you to rotate out of the parts of the job that may be less exciting. We talked a lot about automation on some of the parts of the job that we would love to automate, like fries, for example. It’s the hottest job in the kitchen, and that grease might hit you, and it doesn’t always feel as satisfying as perhaps, you know, selling an order in at the expo station or bringing food to a table and getting that great smile from the people who are eating. So we kind of view that as a little bit part of our retention play, is to give everybody a different role on the team and the whole team kind of wins together.

Kerr: Beyond Shake Shack, just, I mean industrywide, are most people leaving a fast -service restaurant kind of job because it’s just time to move on or out of some kind of, like, you know, I don’t like the work conditions that I’m under, or something else? Like, is it, how much of it is related to things that you can address?

So: Yeah, I think about half of it is people who are students, and you leave for the summer, or your job changes, or your hours need to be a certain way, and this happens to work for it. The other half, and this is the part that we feel that we are responsible for controlling. The other half are folks who say, you know, “It got to be really grueling. I spent a lot of time on my feet. I didn’t get a lot of great, positive interactions with guests. I had a lot of negative ones, where the fries were cold and the shake was not what I wanted.” And one too many of those really starts to kind of build on your mental health a little bit. And I think that our responsibility as a restaurant is to make sure that those are fewer and far between. Shake Shack has the ambition to grow to 1,500 company-owned stores. Today we’re about 380 in the U.S. So there’s a lot of opportunity built in, we feel, to keep growing our employee base toward those new restaurants and saying, “Hey, if you move up and you’re able to achieve that general management position within one location, we actually can put you in that prime spot to take on a new restaurant and really kind of make it your own.” So I think that’s unique from our standpoint that if we’re able to retain folks through that management level, we can provide kind of a bigger growth path than some of our more established competition.

Kerr: Chris, this is going to be a sweeping question, but as you think about the attractiveness to labor that businesses have more broadly, what are some of the things in the course that get emphasized, you know, as you’re trying to hold on to a worker a bit longer, reduce that churn?

Stanton: I think the answer there is that it’s really actually hard to conceptualize a set of practices that are uniform across places other than leaders being in tune with what the demands are from frontline workers. And so, ultimately, I think like the central organizing principle is that you have to have a good culture that puts employees first and is going to be willing to invest in employees to build an attractive place. But the actual sort of elements of what’s attractive will typically vary beyond just being in a setting where there’s some sense that employees are respected and, you know, at a restaurant that might be having trash bags that aren’t going to break when you take things out to the dumpster, and in another setting it might be giving you interesting work because you plan to be there for a long time. But, ultimately, listening to the voice of the employee is probably the unifying theme throughout the class on that front.

Kerr: That’s great, into your original kind of part of that. The old phrase that people don’t leave, you know, bad companies, they leave bad managers remains ever true toward the future of work, as well as the past.

Stanton: Yeah, I think I wrote a paper on that more than 10 years ago, but that remains true today.

Kerr: Yeah, great. So, Steph, I want to take you back. The pandemic comes along, and that’s a shocking event in all of our memories. But those that were in your industry were particularly affected, had to particularly kind of think through essential worker strategies. Just talk to us a few minutes about the highlights of how Shake Shack went through the pandemic. And where did you come out on the other side?

So: Yeah, it was a wild time for, you know, availability of frontline workers. We closed all of our restaurants at a point. So everything that we were taking as an order had to come through some sort of digital channel. And this was a real challenge to us, because we had just started rolling out kiosks in some of our locations. And there was a moment where we looked at our restaurant fleet and we said, “Is anyone ever going to feel comfortable touching a screen that somebody else has touched ever again?” And we actually paused a little bit of that rollout and thinking, “Maybe we need to go specifically to the app and the web, so everybody’s using their own device in order to place an order in our kitchen.” We hit a moment during Covid where we’re actually having trouble getting enough frontline employees into the restaurant in order to deliver our product. So what ended up happening was, we actually expedited our rollout of kiosks because it helped take away that one rote piece of a team member’s job, which is continually entering in orders, and put that in the hands of our guests. I remember during the actual pandemic time, our operators had these handheld kiosks, so these handheld iPads with the sanitation wipes that would wipe down each screen between each user. I mean, this is the level that we were at in terms of not understanding really how long this was going to last and how comfortable people were going to be using these devices. But I think what we learned is, it was actually a great replacement for what was not a great value-added part of the consumer interaction. It can feel empowering for a customer. There are certain consumers who will feel that I can order on the kiosk faster than anyone else can. It’s the same self-checkout person at grocery. And then the team member has a much better experience, which is, I’m going to deliver you your food to your table—or during Covid, to your car—whatever it takes to kind of make that a more positive interaction.

Kerr: That’s good, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard of technology trying to come in and isolate a part of the job where there’s negative interactions, put the technology on that, but then keep all the positive—handing the warm fries over to somebody¬¬—for the team member. So how did you come to that realization that that’s what you should be arching toward?

So: I think there’s almost a parody—and you hear it in movies and in memes all the time: “Would you like fries with that?” I think the upsell engagement is a little bit more challenging person to person. But what we’ve discovered in digital is there’s so many ways to make it less intrusive. It’s an X that I can just X away, or if I’m not interested, I can just move on, and it’s not a person asking me or making any sort of presumption. Our bacon upsell on the kiosk is probably double what it is in person, because our team member is never going to say to you at cash, like, “Do you want bacon on all your sandwiches?” It feels a little presumptive. Or “Do you want to make all of your sandwiches into doubles or triples?” But when you’re at the kiosk and the choices are just laid in front of you, we actually find people make their own choices and frankly, make their own more indulgent choice, because there’s no judgment. So it’s kind of interesting cause I think that the way we all have evolved as customers has changed the way we want to interact with a team member.

Kerr: And then how do you experiment around what the kiosk is going to ask? Are you running this store by store, these experiments or tests around, how do you design that part of the technology?

So: So we have a user experience design team that actually interestingly tests all of this on the back before it ever hits a store. And we build prototypes and test them against each other—where users will go through our flow on various prototypes. And we will compare quantitatively which one took them less time to get through. And then we look at it qualitatively as well. We want those same users to say “I really didn’t like how that bacon was so big, and it was this huge button, and I felt like I had to exit out to get it out of my way. It was really almost intrusive.” And so that kind of helps us understand what’s the guest really seeing. So we actually maniacally test these very, very small changes so that we can get a quantitative answer that says, “You know what, this has zero impact on our service time. It actually allows, you know, guests to get through the kiosk flow much faster.” Interestingly, we don’t use a CMS, like a big content management layer, in order to serve all of our kiosks. It’s something I would love to do one day. Right now, they’re just iPads. And so the challenge with that is it’s not as robust from AB testing. We actually have to kind of go full fleet.

Kerr: As we think about the role of the chaos, I’d also like to ask about customer kind of segmentation and what I have in mind here is that one of the local banks near me, you always hear them advertise that we have the best mobile app in all the business, and we have warm cookies in our branches, which I’ve interpreted to mean they’re talking to two different groups, both of whom they want to appeal to. So, as you roll out the technology in Shake Shack, do you always, like, leave one lane open for someone that wants to do it in person or some alternatives around that?

So: I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like warm cookies, so I think that is not segmentation at all. We do always leave one lane open. We were told older folks are never going to want to use a kiosk because it’s so impersonal, and this is really just for the tech savvy, millennial/Gen Zer—all the way down. And the opposite has proven true twice. I often see elderly folks who prefer to be on a kiosk because they don’t feel rushed, and our menu boards in our restaurants don’t have pictures of every single item, but the kiosk does. We’ve actually gotten some feedback because of the accessibility that you have to have on an iPad, the contrast of the color, the size of the buttons, etc. And then younger folks—and I’ll just reference my own, you know, 14 and 11 year old—and there are times where they’ve got cash, and they’re with a gaggle of middle school students, and it is not easy for them to transact on a kiosk because Mom and Dad have not given me a cashless means to live my life yet. So when I was working at a Shake Shack at cash, it was interesting, because actually most of the folks coming up were younger kids with, you know, a wad of ones and quarters that were buying a side of fries. So it was interesting and very counterintuitive.

Kerr: Chris, as you think about how technology is going to reshape so many different industries, how much is this difference of customer experiences, this heterogeneity, going to be a feature in how quickly organizations change to do that next thing? Is it something that’s always going to be slowing down the process? Or are most companies going to be able to adopt one strategy that is independent of the demographic group or customer base?

Stanton: One of the reasons that I was excited about this case in particular is, it walks you through different ways that you can personalize hospitality or personalize an offering to different customer bases, and that’s going to be a challenge that I think is going to be uniform between digitalization or different channels that companies are going to be rolling out. And from my read, the Shake Shack team has done this really well by doing lots of market research to understand who’s using apps, who’s using, you know, order at the counter or point of sale system. And they’ve given people a menu of options, but they reinforce one another, so that if you want to stand in line but the line’s long, you go to the kiosk or you order on your app. And in that way, I think that they have really navigated this in a way where they’ve probably found some counterintuitive behavior that they wouldn’t have understood, especially around sort of the age profile, but just giving people new options also probably enforces or builds a better experience for people who aren’t using those options.

Kerr: Yeah, Steph, this could segue us right into the data strategy, and in the case, it describes 3 legs of a stool: having data, analyzing it, and then serving up the personalization, I think that Chris was describing there. So tell us a bit about the digital journey that you have set up at Shake Shack and what are some of the key things that are accomplished and coming up.

So: I think every restaurant and retailer is struggling with the right level of personalization. So when you get it wrong, it can be very off putting. So we really try to think about what are the ways we can segment our guest, not just on a specific item—that’s pulling their order history—but you know, what are the ways that we know we can get it right and we’re always adding value and there’s very little chance of detracting? So we have a whole regional marketing program where we think about, you know, opening a Shake Shack in Plano, Texas, is very different than opening the 16th Shake Shack in Midtown Manhattan. So in Plano, they don’t know us too well, and we try to do a lot of really fun events around our restaurants. We have running clubs, and we, you know, we call it Shack Track & Field. So go for a run and then come have a beer.

Kerr: Burn the calories before you...

So: So, if you live near Plano, Texas, you may get an invitation to Shack Track & Field. If you open the app in Plano, Texas, you’ll actually probably see a little bit of a content card or a little piece of advertising from us that says, “Hey, Shack Track & Field meets on Tuesdays in Plano.” (Shake Shack Pickleball Club was an actual national tour that we did.) So outside of just regional, I want to get to the place where we do know your last order, where we do know your favorite items, where we know it’s Tuesday and you always come on Wednesday. Those patterns, I think, we will get there but we’re wary of having seen some of our competitive brands do this incorrectly and start to get to a place where it’s almost so hyper-personalized that the customers is, like, “How do you even know that about me?”

Kerr: I mean an extreme, you can imagine like giving dietary advice like, “The last three times you’ve taken the extra bacon. Maybe this time skip it,” you know, and that may not be what you’re hoping for.

So: Exactly, right.

Kerr: Let’s go back, though, to the distinctive vibe of Shake Shack, which is the employee experience. We talked about how the kiosks took away one of the most, maybe, dreadful tasks that they were faced with. What are the other ways you’re thinking about the digital world to enable the employee experience to be better, to kind of increase the lifetime that they’ll be with you, and so forth?

So: One of the ways recently has been doing challenges with our guests. We actually have in the past relied on sometimes team members recognizing you in the line and saying, “Oh, he’s here again. Let’s make sure we comp his fries,” or “Make sure he has a great experience,” or “Let’s clean that corner table for her.” I think those are really difficult ways to scale that hospitality that we’re trying to put out there. So one of the new things we’re working on is we’re trying reward challenges with offers. And I think it’s a little bit different from how we see a lot of our competitors doing loyalty programs, where it’s 100 points gets you $10 off. In our case, the goal here is just to personalize the experience and give the team member a little bit of access to an already happy customer. So, you know, someone coming in for their fourth visit because they got that coupon is pretty excited to be there, and it takes the pressure off the team member to say, “Oh, it’s that guy who comes all the time, and he gets a chocolate shake. Let me make sure I have that ready.” So I kind of see that that as the future of personalization—that you’re targeting a customer, yes, but also giving them a relevant offer and then they can pre-order that or choose to order on premise, but the team member doesn’t have to do so much of that anticipatory work and can just focus on having a great vibe.

Kerr: Are there any other functions? We earlier mentioned the fryer, I think, was like, “Should we automate that?” Any other things you’re anticipating over the next couple of years to be places that we’re going to try to think about technology as a way to address that part of the function?

So: We are looking at different automation equipment throughout our flow. I think one of the things we will never change at Shake Shack is, you know, for example, the beef blend, which is really our core ingredients, or the way we cook our chicken, for example. There are some real process and ingredient things that we don’t ever want to change. One example is handspun shakes. We spin those shakes individually in the back, and today, during the class, we were discussing this and one of the students said, “I didn’t even know that Shake Shack spun each of the shakes by hand,” and in our minds we’re like, “Man, we are not getting credit for what is an incredibly huge investment in labor.” So we’re trying to make sure we either showcase that so that the guest is seeing what tremendous effort goes into making those shakes, or we start to automate certain parts of that without changing the core ingredients.

Kerr: One of things we hear a lot about is the labor crunch, generally, and then there’s differences across labor markets, and just recognizing that Shake Shacks face a different labor environment in Manhattan versus Plano, Texas. So do you anticipate there being variation across your restaurants in terms of the labor vs. technology input, or does everything going to get ultimately standardized against some best practice that corporate is setting out?

So: They’re pretty standard, in terms of the tools at the disposal for the restaurant. So almost all of our restaurants will have kiosks. The POS [point-of-sale] setup is the same. The availability of third-party delivery in app and web is all available. But what ends up being very different—so California is a very expensive labor market for us, and what we found, actually, is it also happens to coincide with a very high degree of digital penetration. So we end up seeing a lot more digital orders coming into a California restaurant, which actually works in our favor, and maybe less so in other parts of the country. So we’re trying to figure out is our tech stack set up to make sure we offload some of those challenging and labor-intensive pieces so that we can keep operating in some of the more expensive-to-operate states and locales.

Kerr: Yeah, it’s striking. I’ve never contemplated the thing that would lead toward that particular labor crunch is also perhaps going to shift the types of revenue streams you’re working toward and how that could build there. Chris, any cross-market differences you’re following in terms of labor availability and the relative kind of forces companies are dealing with?

Stanton: Obviously regulations, especially in places like California, have made frontline operations and frontline work challenging in ways that places like Texas or places with different labor market institutions do not. But I thought Steph’s answer was brilliant there, deploying technologies that interact in some ways. One thing that’s in the case that we didn’t touch on yet is the question of deploying delivery robots or other tools like that. And if you think about what we have here in Boston, there are no delivery robots. I was just in L.A., and there are delivery robots that are in fights on the sidewalk to get around one another. And part of that is surely weather, but part of it is also that we face very different labor markets and institutions around just the attractiveness of some of these positions. And maybe here it’s not quite as bad to be a delivery driver compared to driving long distances in L.A. between places to where, then, you’re only driving a mile or two to deliver to deliver food. So I think operators are going to certainly be facing the questions of different markets, but I think the regulatory piece is probably the first order piece, and then the labor market tightness questions probably follow secondarily.

Kerr: Steph, I want to go back to how you as a management team are approaching Shake Shack. And you’re quite famous for your black truffle fries. But maybe among the business community, you’re also famous for the “second mouse” strategy. So I want you to describe for us what the second mouse strategy is and, you know, how did it come about?

So: I think I originally heard it from Leonard Lauder, who was, you know, executive chairman at Estee Lauder when I was working there. And he said there’s not always a disadvantage to being the second mouse, because the first mouse goes into the trap, gets killed, and the second mouse then just kind of walks around that and gets the cheese. Make sure you really need that first-mover advantage if you’re going to pursue it, because it can be very expensive. And for me at Shake Shack, what’s been so interesting is, we feel that we are a scaled concept, but we are nowhere near an entrenched QSR [quick service restaurant] concept with 3,000 stores. We’re still operating at, you know, 380 company-owned in the U.S. So we can’t really always be that first mouse. The robot example is one that I love, because we were approached by every robot brand. And I said, “Absolutely yes, I would love to. However, for me to build a custom integration into my app for all these different by-location delivery robot providers is going to be impossible.” And we watched and watched and watched until one of our partners, Uber Eats, decided to build an integration that could be used across all these different providers. And they really took out a lot of the red tape for us. They actually worked with different geographies, different cities, made sure that these were legal and all of that. And we were the second restaurant behind another competitor of ours to adopt in Miami, first, the robot delivery of our food through Uber Eats. I was so glad we went second. They had worked out a lot of the kinks. We watched and saw what was successful and waited until the integration was built. And I think we wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise. So maybe it makes us look very smart from having saved some of the money, but it’s interesting also to see now we have that learning, and we’ve expanded to L.A. and Chicago, as well.

Kerr: Yeah, it’s striking, because I think on the kiosk side, if I’m roughly remembering correctly, kiosks were coming out only in 2019. So you had to have been pretty much at the start of that wave. So that’s a place where you were sort of leading innovation. And in the robot delivery, it’s a place you’ve been waiting to see someone else’s neck get broken by the proverbial mouse trap. Were those conscious choices on those two sides?

So: They really were. And it’s funny, because on kiosk we will reference a of much less known restaurant concept out of New Jersey that was starting to do kiosks. It was just an iPad, and we really liked the elegance of that. We thought, “Oh, that’s something we could build because it’s an iOS app. It should be pretty easy.” So we still think we were the second mouse on kiosk. However, I think it’s a little bit different, because, to your point, we were really doing it at scale quite early—we felt, like, boldly. But I think we had built enough data points internally that we felt like this was not going to be too much risk.

Kerr: I remember about that time I was teaching in the Managing the Future of Work class, and I had gone to London, and I took pictures of the kiosk at McDonald’s. And I brought them back and showed them to the class, and it was like oohs and ahhs at this amazing thing of technology that had descended upon the restaurant industry. So the world moves fast in this. What are you looking in terms of artificial intelligence? How do you feel that’s going to be impacting Shake Shack?

So: AI, I think, is going to inform a lot of what we talked about on the three legs of the stool—how we ingest data and then what we do with it. AI can really help to, you know, personalize, understand the data and understand trends and be more predictive. The other side that I think is going to be a massive unlock for restaurant operations is to take the role of a restaurant GM and say, “How are you doing on labor, waste, sales, your restaurant-level margins? What’s the guest feedback that you’re getting?” There are so many inputs that a singular restaurant general manager can look at to try to assess “Where are my opportunities?” And in our corporate office we spend a lot of time trying to help each individual restaurant figure out here are your opportunities to either improve margin or drive sales. And I think that there are some interesting tools now for restaurant operators that actually goes right down to the location level and says, “Here’s what your Google reviews say. Here’s what your first-party reviews say. Here’s what third-party delivery partners are saying about your single location.” And that really helps them to be able to optimize and say, “Oh, I’m late on all my Door Dash orders. I’ve got to figure that out,” or “Everyone says that there’s something funny about my custard machine. I better go take a look.” But I think sometimes when there’s such a mass of data at the corporate level, we start to aggregate all that up, and we think that everything’s great. And perhaps at one single location, there’s still a ton of opportunity.

Kerr: Beyond the robot delivering AI, is there any other big technological item or trend or force that you’re imagining is going to substantially change the restaurant trade over the next, say, 10 years?

So: The thing I’m so obsessed with right now is voice. I think that there’s going to be a transition from ordering by punching in my order to speaking, and I think I’m specifically looking at this when it comes to in the car. So everyone has asked me, “When are you going to build a CarPlay app?” And, back to second mouse, I don’t have the resources in our company to build our own proprietary CarPlay app, but I would love someone to go out there and figure out how all restaurants can leverage the same platform for voice. If you could kind of pre-order in the car on the way, that actually would probably drive a lot more people to Shake Shack. If it can be hot and ready and waiting for you, that’s such a huge value to the guest.

Kerr: That’s great, Chris. Let’s go back to how today went—the debut of the case. Was there anything in either writing the case up or in the class discussion today that was a big surprise for you?

Stanton: I think there were two big surprises writing the case. One is that my mental model of job hierarchies in a restaurant would put the fryer last, anything else with heat close to the bottom. And that means that customer interactions and things that are more interpersonal would be closer to the top. One of the things that I learned is that many people who are working the cash register or taking orders or things like that actually prefer the other jobs. And that really surprised me, because I thought that this automation solution might have pushed people into jobs that were not quite as favorable. And it turns that there is at least some gap between customer demands and what employees are able to do on the job, and an abusive customer can take, really, a lot of bandwidth and mental impact from a worker. The second thing that I learned in writing the case was the chief marketing officer here owns essentially all of the innovation piece of the company. And Steph is kind of stepping into that role. But then, if you think about it, what makes the company’s ability to execute? It’s that they have to understand the customers, that they have to understand restaurant operations, that they have to do market research, that they have to do testing afterward, where people are walking around with GoPros to understand the flow through a restaurant. And so really having that all roll up into someone who’s going to be responsible for revenue, I think, is really smart. But at first I was very surprised that that organizational choice was the one that you made. But now, in hindsight, I think most of the students in the class today agreed, that Shake Shack is among the leaders in terms of how they’ve made the choices to get to where they are on the digitization and automation front.

Kerr: Steph, with your chief growth officer hat and the way you described your multifaceted job, do you find others around you—your fellow chief growth officers and so forth—are also similarly taking on ever larger end-to-end roles of the innovation function?

So: It’s really split. There was a student in class today who referred to how digital innovation happened in consulting and when he did it on the pharma side and that digital innovation is kind of pushed out there as another group. That’s actually more consistent with what I’ve seen across restaurant ops. And I’ve been lucky in my role that it’s so tied to sales, because, you know, it makes us really careful around the investments we make. If you sat in a separate technology function, you’d be like, “Well, these are great, so don’t worry about it,” and, you know, “I promise there’ll be a benefit felt somewhere.” My team actually has to build business cases against any digital innovation, and I’ve got to make sure our ROI is at least on a three-year cash-on-cash. I also think our size is to our benefit here. So we’re a little bit smaller than some of these bigger corporations. So we’ve had to pull together some of these functions on our executive team, so they all kind of sit together. So it’s interesting. I feel lucky that my remit goes from culinary—so there will be days I’m sitting in the kitchen and eating lots of food—all the way through that digital piece and walking through a restaurant flow with a GoPro to see, “Did it work? Like, did that burger that we thought was awesome in the innovation kitchen, is it having the guest feedback that we expected?” So it’s great to be able to own those two ends of the flow. I don’t think that it works once you get to 3,000 stores. And I think we’re, you know, small and nimble enough that we can kind of see that end-to-end.

Kerr: So as a final question, let’s go back all the way up to that employee experience, which has been, since your founding of the business, central to you. What are you keeping your eye on as key workforce management issues in the 5, 10 years ahead?

So: When I’m back on the campus at HBS, what always strikes me is looking at folks trying to build a career. A lot of folks here on campus are looking for an AI job or a tech job. And one of the things I was talking to one of your students after class was, you know, hospitality is actually a really interesting place. You’re always going to need to eat. There’s always going to be innovation in this space. That energy around disrupting ourselves is something that, you know, luckily that’s part of our culture at Shake Shack, that we’re pretty nimble and disruptive, because we have to be in many ways. But I hope to grow that on my team so that they’re always kind of looking a little bit ahead and thinking, “OK, what are the things we can do with our skills that would be different, fun, and build that guest experience at the end?”

Kerr: That sounds like a wonderful career opportunity. Thank you so much to both Steph and Chris for joining us today.

Steph So: Thanks for having us.

Chris Stanton: Thanks, Bill.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.