Restaurant back-office technology has spent decades telling operators what already happened.

David Cantu believes it should tell them what to do next.

David, CEO of Craftable and co-founder of HotSchedules, returns to ChatGTM with Michael Beck and Chad Horn to talk about rebuilding restaurant back office around the people actually running restaurants.

His analogy nails the shift: the old back office is a rearview mirror. The new back office should be a GPS.

That means forecasting sales, determining what to order and prep, planning staffing, identifying leakage and surfacing the few actions a manager can take before the opportunity is gone.

The conversation goes deep into restaurant profitability, technology adoption, inventory, waste, forecasting, AI and David's belief that we need to connect managers emotionally to margins.

And despite building heavily with AI, when asked what's currently overhyped in restaurant technology, David's answer is simple: AI.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome to ChatGTM
01:53 David Cantu Returns
04:13 What Followed David Home From Prosper?
05:34 Why Great Leaders Never Stop Learning
06:00 Removing Friction From a Manager's Day
08:09 The Power of Connection
10:47 Developing the Next Generation of Leaders
12:00 Removing Back-Office Friction
12:49 Why Back-Office Implementations Fail
14:17 Connecting Managers Emotionally to Margins
15:10 Are Your Highest-Sales Stores Really Your Best?
16:14 The Fear of Another Tech Implementation
17:13 Making Restaurant Tech Implementation Work
18:26 The Items Driving Restaurant Profitability
19:57 What's Changed in Restaurant Technology?
21:26 Restaurants Are Still Using Fax Machines?!
22:21 Modernizing Restaurant Workflows
23:21 The Restaurant Ordering Problem
24:15 What David Learned Checking Deliveries
25:09 How Much Purchased Food Never Reaches the Plate?
25:37 Why Restaurant PARs Are Outdated
27:02 From 60K to Nearly 1M Lines of Code
28:15 Finding Money in Any Economy
29:00 Adoption, Adoption, Adoption
30:34 Stop Burying Managers in Dashboards
32:11 From Rearview Mirror to Restaurant GPS
32:49 What Prescriptive Restaurant Tech Looks Like
34:00 Forecasting Sales, Orders, Prep & Staffing
35:34 Building Forecasts Operators Trust
36:32 How Accurate Can Forecasting Become?
38:55 When Is It Time to Leave Legacy Tech?
39:29 Why Generic AI Isn't Enough
41:28 Turning Restaurant Data Into Action
42:46 Finding Voids, Comps & Hidden Problems
43:40 Building Technology for the Front Line
44:06 Are Managers Getting Their Share?
44:58 A Million Ways Restaurants Lose Margin
46:45 Why David Is Going to FSTEC
48:56 Why David Doesn't Obsess Over Competitors
49:42 Rapid Fire
50:02 AI Assistant or AI Agent?
50:14 The Metric Operators Don't Understand
51:07 The Most Overhyped Restaurant Tech: AI
51:18 David's Leadership Advice
52:54 The Future of Restaurant Operations
53:20 Stop Selling AI. Tell Operators What It Does.
55:01 Where to Find David & Craftable
56:00 Why ChatGTM Has These Conversations
56:56 Closing

Is your restaurant technology telling you what happened, or helping you decide what to do next? Tell us below.

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