Angelo Esposito [00:00:00]:

One of the things I love most about the hospitality industry. I've met so many VP of Ops, COOs, CEOs of these large businesses that started as like a frontline employee. Where else do you have that upward growth trajectory?

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Brock Weeks [00:00:16]:

That's true, actually. That's true. I never thought of it like that, but you're right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:19]:

Like, it's phenomenal. It's so to me, like, love it. Like, man, you're really lifting people up.

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Brock Weeks [00:00:32]:

Foreign. Welcome to another episode of WISKing It All. We're joined today by Brock Weeks, the founder and CEO of Savi. Savi is a cloud based video intelligence and operations platform and it's really built for multi unit restaurants and retailers. So Brock, I'm excited to dive in. Thanks for joining us today.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:55]:

Yeah, absolutely. Angelo, looking forward to it. Thanks for having me on.

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Brock Weeks [00:00:58]:

I know we'll get into a lot of cool stuff, but I always like to start with this, you know, what is Savi? So people at least know who I'm talking to. And then we'll kind of go from there. So maybe we'll definitely go deeper. But at a high level, can you tell people in your own words what is Savi?

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:13]:

Yeah. At a high level, Savi helps operators of multi site restaurants, retailers we classify as distributed enterprise be able to understand the moments in their stores that are driving the results they achieve using video and AI.

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Brock Weeks [00:01:30]:

Interesting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:31]:

So there is so many questions, right? There's discrepancy, there's reviews, there's wait times, all of these things. The answers have been trapped in these video surveillance systems and being used as expensive insurance policies. But if AI can structure data, provide insight, you can now start to aggregate all of that data together to go. This is why we're getting negative wait times, is because it's taking this long to walk through a line so we can dive into it more. Because understanding those moments act your results.

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Brock Weeks [00:02:02]:

I love that. I love that. Makes a ton of sense. So you know, I was like understanding the, the why and the how behind it. So, so, you know, we'll definitely get into the, into the weeds and make sure people have a way to contact you. Contact Savi, learn more with a lot of restaurant operators that listen in. So maybe this will resonate with some of our Ulti Unit operator listeners and then they'll reach out. But I always like to just have the passion.

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Brock Weeks [00:02:24]:

I want to start off with your story. Like, how did you kind of get into this journey of, I guess, simply put, what made you want to start Savi. Maybe that's an easier way of putting it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:38]:

We'll start off with the end, which is completely locked into the restaurant space. And now I don't ever see myself working in any other industry. So fun. Just such good people. But I was, I've been in security and automation and technology space the bulk of my career from, you know, starting out of College in 2009. Was fortunate to join a pretty high growth home security and automation company. Spent some time in sales with them and then with the large infusion of capital from a private equity transaction, I moved over to the corporate strategy team.

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Brock Weeks [00:03:13]:

Nice.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:13]:

We spent a lot of time looking at. Back then they had leveraged the security system to become a home automation system. Now it's kind of everyday use in our homes. We can control our thermostats and lights and door locks and stuff from our phones. But back then there really wasn't an affordable way to do that. And we're kind of pioneers in that. And so as that started to ride its wave and we were looking from a strategy standpoint, we started looking at the commercial security space to see if the same type of thing could be done. And it was at that time that we saw the opportunity for Savi.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:47]:

It didn't make sense for that company to pursue it. The technology wasn't ready yet. Which AI being able to use computer vision in an affordable, economical way just wasn't ready.

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Brock Weeks [00:03:58]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:58]:

I left, went and did a tech startup for a few years, exited out of that. After about six months of, you know, hanging out and doing my thing with my family, we realized, I gotta ask.

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Brock Weeks [00:04:08]:

What was that tech startup? Was it related to? Like, I gotta know.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:12]:

The backstory it was in there was I wasn't the founder that when I joined and helped them kind of take it to market and commercialize it. And it was in the health tech space.

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Brock Weeks [00:04:21]:

Okay.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:22]:

It was selling to orthopedic and cardiothoracic surgeons. A patient platform.

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Brock Weeks [00:04:27]:

Okay.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:28]:

Yeah. Really cool tech. Nowhere near as fun as spending time in the restaurants. So that same idea was like, all right, the technology is starting to converge where we can do this. And the premise of it was we met with all of these large operators with thousands of locations.

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Brock Weeks [00:04:45]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:46]:

And they got all excited with simple, simple features around like, oh, an alarm system could tell us when the door was open the first time so we know when the store was opened. And I was like, this fascinated me. I'm like, you have cameras in there already. Couldn't you just answer that question? And they're like, well, yeah, it's so hard to access. It's too time consuming and you know, you're just. The only way you can really search it is by time. And no one has time to go and say, oh let's 8 o' clock it wasn't open. So when did it open?

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Brock Weeks [00:05:18]:

802. That's one store. And then you gotta do that in every store. Yeah, that's fair.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:23]:

Correct. And so you were like, okay, well there's that. And they're like, but it's not just like that. We don't know when the stores are opening. If we're operating hundreds of thousands of sites, we see discrepancies amongst inventory and cash. From a loss prevention standpoint, we get negative online reviews that say our service times or our service was terrible. Did we make them wait too long? Were we not friendly? Were we not staffed properly? Was it an operational problem? All of the kind of indicators that these multi site restaurants get are all just symptoms. But you need to be able to point back to that root cause.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:57]:

And video and audio of the in store interactions with guests, real live interactions has that insight. It just needs to be easy to access, easy to search by your business systems. And then if AI can help analyze and structure that data for you, it can become one of the most powerful tools at answering questions. So you can just move from making decisions off of anecdotal evidence in the gut to like, no, what is the data and what actually happened?

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Brock Weeks [00:06:27]:

That's really cool. And I know you guys, I think it was a couple years ago, were raised like a $12 million Series A. And you know, that, that, I'm sure that definitely helps with the, with the product development, but I'd love to know like what did the early days look like for you guys? Right? So you're talking in these restaurants, you're understanding like, okay, there's a lot of simple things, but that's hard for them. So great. Identifying the, you know, the clear pain and how you can kind of maybe build a solution. How do you go about that first version that, that 1.0 where you're like, let, let's, let's test this out. Like how did you guys go with. I'd love to hear that, that story?

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:03]:

Yeah, I think first and foremost we were really lucky to have some great operators here. Locally where we're at, we're in northern Utah is where we're basically headquartered out of. And there were some great operators kind of in emerging fast casual brands that wanted to innovate and wanted to Test things. And so we were really fortunate not having a background in operating to be able to spend time in these restaurants and with these operators really understanding their problem and they were willing, willing to invest. And I think that's one of the greatest things about the restaurant industry is everyone's willing to share their challenges and how they're solving problems because it affects everyone. Very similar. We all have our own processes, the different brands, but ubiquitously, most of the main problems affect everyone.

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Brock Weeks [00:07:51]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:52]:

And so there's that collaborative effort to what is the highest touch problems. And interestingly enough, the products that we're now releasing or have released over the last nine months, early on, in the very beginning, were all identified as the biggest pain points, which was being able to track the guest experience of how long it takes them to go through these experiences that you've designed. And if you make tweaks like adding in kiosks or changing the way that you're doing ordering, adding a portal for pickup, all of these changes, what's the actual result? Like, what does it affect? The technology just wasn't there yet. Computer vision wasn't accurate enough or affordable enough from looking at that said. All right, well, the lowest friction point that technology is able to do is move the video to the cloud. And any hardware, no matter, we're not going to have to go purchase a lot of expensive hardware will allow any operator, as long as they have an open camera system, to be able to move that data to the cloud and start to connect it to business systems. The very first one was the point of sale. Makes natural sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:01]:

But then you start to connect the labor systems, those security sensors and temperature sensors and other IoT devices that are on site to allow you to search your video by your other systems.

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Brock Weeks [00:09:13]:

That's cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:14]:

Now you can answer questions quicker.

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Brock Weeks [00:09:16]:

That's really cool. That's so interesting because you think about it and it's so easy, let's say on the tech side, meaning, you know, if I think about online companies, it's, it's, it's, it's not trivial. I mean, today it's just a B testing and I'm going to change this on my website. How does it perform? Or are you having a control the AB experiment and you know, let me see the results. But to your point, how do you do that in a real life scenario? And now you have a way. The answer is, hey, cameras are recording a pattern. Now we're going to switch this operational workflow and we're going to measure again. And it makes sense.

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Brock Weeks [00:09:54]:

But it's like so hard to actually execute. And so like, what you're doing is, you know, which brings me, my next question is, you know, tackling this, I'm sure is no easy feat. So I'm curious, like, what are some challenges that you maybe didn't see coming when you're working on Savi?

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:10]:

Yeah, that's a great question. We don't develop our own AI models. And from the beginning we made the bet that models would become commoditized from the generally, you know, high use ones. The second bet that we learned and had to make early because we didn't anticipate how difficult it would be, is that there's so much specialization involved. Once you leave the general human and vehicle detection and tracking, everything almost becomes custom development, if you will. And that doesn't scale very well. Right. For a tech company with limited resources, you almost become more of a professional services firm than providing technology to them.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:57]:

And it's great, you can engage and you can get in there with the customer, but how do you make that economical for them? Because if that's all you can do as a professional services firm, it becomes where the value isn't there for that brand and you can't make it affordable enough for them because you can't reuse it with other brands. Does that make sense?

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Brock Weeks [00:11:16]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:16]:

And that challenge, like, we didn't anticipate it actually requiring that much tweaking. And the second thing is we didn't understand the pain point of how hard it is to keep infrastructure up to date across hundreds and thousands of locations. Like, we would meet with brands and there's all of these great ideas around how they want to solve these problems. And then we dive into it. It's like, oh, yeah, well, most of our cameras haven't been updated. We don't even know if half of them are working right.

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Brock Weeks [00:11:49]:

Oh my God.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:50]:

And so it was very much the two problems we actually need to be able to solve for people is how do you actually future proof their infrastructure on site? Because that's one of the biggest, most expensive things is, yeah, the tech exists, but how do you implement it and keep it updated across the stores? That's why we had to go to the cloud. Like we started looking at even edge computing like everyone else. And it's like, no, if this truly is a data set that's going to continue to progressively unlock value, you have to move it to the cloud like every other data set. And then on the analytics front is where we said, look, we can't Be the analytics provider. We need to build our system to very easily and affordably be able to deploy best in class models to solve problems for customers, whether that's open Source, license through APIs. We need to make it easy to adopt all of these different models as technology progresses together rather than being stuck into one ecosystem. And now yeah, that luckily those two bets have paid out into fruition. That has allowed us to really be able to help unlock the value of the video for those brands.

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Brock Weeks [00:13:04]:

Yeah. Unreal. So what. So you know, for people listening in and they're mag. Okay. I think they get the conceptual idea, but let's, let's go a bit deeper. What does it look like? You know, let's take, I don't know, 50 unit, you know, sandwich shop. They're like, hey, I'm Brock.

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Brock Weeks [00:13:19]:

I'm super interested. I heard, I heard the WISKey and All podcast. It sounded interesting. What, what does the process, let's say look like and, and walk me through the journey. I want a picture like, you know, they talk to you. They made me do a demo. What does onboarding look like? Do they have to get new hardware or not? Like when do they start seeing results? And I'd love to kind of just, you know, paint the picture for the average client. It probably depends on how big the client is, of course, but there's probably some type of process.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:45]:

It's actually like a really, really important question. I think you guys probably run into the same thing in your business is the legacy systems have been so hard to install and adopt and deploy that there's that apprehension. We literally drop ship. So let's say someone says go. First step is making sure they obviously have cameras in the right areas they want to track.

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Brock Weeks [00:14:08]:

Got it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:09]:

But we don't care.

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Brock Weeks [00:14:10]:

You have like a suggested list like, hey, this is what most of our clients do. Okay. Because not I imagine would be sometimes people don't know what they don't know. So it's like, okay, and I guess side question, because this is probably something people want to hear too, is what are maybe. I know you already touched on a few, but what are maybe some of the most common things that people want to see? You know, you mentioned opening time. Did they actually show up on time or closing time? What are some other key ones?

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:33]:

Yeah, I'll kind of bucket them into like safety and loss prevention coverings and then operational coverings. So if you look from the safety and loss prevention standpoint and both all entrances, right. Where someone can come and enter your property and you'll Want to be able to at those entrances identify who's being able to come in. So you want to focus on being able to see the person, either their faces they're leaving or as they're entering from there. Areas where cash or inventory could be handled.

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Brock Weeks [00:15:03]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:04]:

And then areas where they're engaging with customers for any. He said, she said liability, things of that nature makes sense from the operational standpoint. And this is where there is some gaps with some brands is. Well if you want to track your customer experience, you need to have cameras generally overview of, let's see that fast casual environment. We need to be able to see the entry and the flow down the front. Right. So you need to have cameras covering that if it's in the drive through you need to be able to have cameras around the building and you don't have to have complete overlap. It's not like the cameras have to cover everything.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:45]:

But if you want to be able to segment a part of that customer's journey, there has to be a camera there, being able to watch it. So that makes sense when we go into brands because a lot of times there's a poc, right. Of making sure that the system does what we claimed it to do because there is so much smoke and mirrors out there.

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Brock Weeks [00:16:02]:

Of course.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:05]:

But we actually, no matter what, we actually just design a brand playbook for them of like hey, when you build new sites or with your franchisees, we're not the hardware guys. We can make recommendations to a lot of our great partners that do that. But this is what your brand guide should look like. This is what the register camera should look like. This is the areas that you should cover just so that they're prepared for the future.

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Brock Weeks [00:16:28]:

If you want that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:29]:

What's something that our team just does as a consultancy for free is trying to add value. Whether you're using our services or not. To adopt AI, you're going to need to get the infrastructure right. The labor on site of putting it into the most expensive piece.

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Brock Weeks [00:16:42]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:42]:

So even if you're like the technology doesn't exist today, I'm not doing this put the hundred camera in or the 80 camera in while they're there. Because if you're going to use it in the future, far more affordable to do it that way. But from if that is in place, which I would say about 70 of the brands we go into that is in place, they have it that's higher.

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Brock Weeks [00:17:01]:

Than I would have expected. Okay. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:03]:

Because you really don't. If you think like, well, drive through. Yes, I can actually track the vehicle, the entire experience on the property and you can do that. But if they're just wanting to start to do a POC and look, they've got a menu board coverage and a pickup window, we can track that very, very accurately. And you can differentiate between linebuster processes and regular traditional squawk box pickup window and pay type order flows. If all that's in place, we drop ship a little device. It's about the size of a cell phone. They plug it in on the same VLAN of the camera system and provide the credentials to that camera system to our team.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:42]:

That's the installation.

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Brock Weeks [00:17:44]:

Wow. Okay, that's pretty cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:47]:

Then all the magic starts to happen on the back end and all that device does, it's actually not doing processing there on the edge.

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Brock Weeks [00:17:53]:

Okay. Just uploading.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:55]:

Basically it's just encrypting, compressing and sending it securely to our cloud.

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Brock Weeks [00:17:59]:

Okay.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:59]:

Once the video's there, we'll need to receive credentials to their point of sale system through the many great point of sale API partners that we have, or if they have their own in house system sending us that data. We ensure that that's mapped up and the cameras are mapped to the right data points and registers and then define the areas that the AI is going to track. So this is the menu board. So when we show how many vehicles went through there in the wait time, you know, it's that area that's cool. That setup all is done on the back end remotely by our team. And the AI can take up to a week just to calibrate to the property and make sure it's, you know, tracking accurately and maybe tweaks to where the lines are drawn and they're.

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Brock Weeks [00:18:44]:

That's really cool. So. Or one to, to our restaurateurs listening, that's actually pretty neat that it's, you know, proof of concept. Sounds like it's a lot more, a lot less risky than I would have even imagined. You know, you just like you said, you, you're getting a shipment of, you know, small device size of a cell phone kind of plug in place. That's really cool to hear. What is once the data, like you said, might take a bit of time, but once it starts kind of uploading and, and you know, you guys start doing something with the data. What does the, the customer experience look like? Are they like typing in questions? Are there, are they saying like who opened today? Or is there like a dashboard that's like opening? Like what is.

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Brock Weeks [00:19:26]:

I'm just imagining the interaction. What does the interaction look like, let's say from the customer standpoint, if you see it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:31]:

Yeah, we'll talk about what it is today and then where we see it going.

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Brock Weeks [00:19:35]:

Got it, got it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:37]:

So right now there's basically three modules inside. There is the. We call the cloud vms which is hey, I just want to go look at videos, go back in time, search and do that. And there is that module that they can pull up live video and recorded all of that. The thing that brands notice with that piece is that the data is not stored on site so they don't have to wait for it to load and tunnel into that site and risk knocking out their other services. It's just instant and they can give it to everyone in the organization and it's never going to touch the local sites network. That's cool to interact with that video because it's already in the cloud.

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Brock Weeks [00:20:10]:

That's cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:11]:

The second thing is what we call data sync and that's where you can just search your video instead of asking questions like, well, my register said this or this employee claimed they clocked in at this time and entered at this. You just say show me. When Angelo clocked in.

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Brock Weeks [00:20:26]:

That's cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:26]:

On this date, show me. Every time there was a customer complaint I got a charge back. Show me this transaction ID and it will just take you.

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Brock Weeks [00:20:36]:

Nice. You know what it reminds me a bit, a bit of? Have you ever used the app? I mean a bit. It's, it's very different but similar. Have you ever used the app description?

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:45]:

Oh no.

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Brock Weeks [00:20:46]:

No. Okay. It's kind of cool. I'll just quickly explain.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:48]:

I'm gonna have to go look at that.

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Brock Weeks [00:20:49]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like not related, but related. But Descript basically makes editing video like editing a Google Doc. So it's like when you upload the video, it transcribes everything so then if you take out a sentence, you're literally just backspacing and it edits the video at the same time. But also makes it easy because you could search for a part of the video by words and it goes to that part. So it kind of makes like interacting with the video very simple I would say and easy to edit. So it made me think of that as you're kind of talking through is being able to just see that transaction and it goes to that part of the video. But this is great because half the battle, even just like on a personal level when looking at security footage is.

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Brock Weeks [00:21:23]:

Is just finding it's half the battle. You spend so much time. Yeah. Exactly past it and then you're like can I pass it? Then you go back like that in itself. So I can't imagine when you're. When you have dozens and dozens or thousands of locations depending how big these, you know, multi units are. But it's a whole different beast. So that's, that's cool.

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Brock Weeks [00:21:42]:

So for people listening, if they want to find you, I want to plug. I always like to plug. So people, you know, we'll put it in the comments too. But if you want to find you, what's the best way to find Savi and to find you. They might be listening to this and we're not done yet but they might be listening. Okay, this sounds cool. I want to get a demo. Where could they go?

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:00]:

Yeah, first and easiest probably is just getSavi.com Savi S A V I so get Savi.com request a demo. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Would love to chat with you and get with some smarter folks on my team that may be able to answer questions but would love to hear from interactions there and back to kind of the platform. That third piece which is actually where we see the most value is the reporting side of it which is all of that data is aggregated together to just show you in a really concise way what's happening.

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Brock Weeks [00:22:34]:

Okay, that's hard.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:37]:

It's really difficult because we'll use drive thru. We do drive thru speed of service reporting. That's one of our tools. And any camera system is commercial grade open. Throw it in and we can start tracking. And it's the models do it very, very well. But we had to look at like okay, you can now track all this new information. Well great, you're just throwing more information at people.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:58]:

Like we'll look at the way things have been done in store historically with loop systems. And there's a red, yellow, green car. Right. And it shows that actual car. Well, what's the byproduct of if you're not displaying data the right way? Data should encourage behaviors that drive the end result you want. And we've all experienced going in a drive through and maybe it was taking a little bit longer because something happened that may or may not have been in control of the employees there. But your vehicle turned on. Yeah.

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Brock Weeks [00:23:32]:

Damn ice cream machine. It's always the ice cream machine.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:34]:

Yep, it's the ice cream machine or slushy. And I've got kids so that's what my mom's getting. And maybe I'm blaming the ice cream on the Kids, really me. But, right, you get pulled forward or they like hold you up somewhere else and you're like, what's going on? And then you get forgotten about. It's actually not driving what you want, which is a good customer experience that's consistent because you can't control everything and you might get an order wrong and there might be refund issues, things like that, but you're looking for a generally consistent experience. So if you look at an isolated single experience, well, that's going to lead to customers or employees making bad decisions because it's not a trend. And so we had to rethink the way that that was done. And what I think AI is doing because there's so much buzzwords out there about it, but it allows you to actually gain insight extremely quick from massive amounts of data.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:27]:

And we believe it's going to change our reporting and our platform as it exists today from very much a find the symptoms, go or review the symptom, go find the root cause and take action. Right, that's currently. Today we believe that that review and find is going to be replaced by AI and it's going to be very much of, hey, you're visiting this location. Here's the checklist of things you need to address. Now, if you want to click on that checklist and go right to that point in time or the data behind that, you can and make it really easy to do that. But it's all about just enabling the team to do what they do really well, which is coach their team members instead of spending the time looking for things.

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Brock Weeks [00:25:13]:

Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:13]:

Get them the information and insight as quick as possible so they can take action.

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Brock Weeks [00:25:18]:

That makes sense. I love that. Really well said. I love the way you kind of hit those three kind of core modules. And again, for people listening in, they know where to find you now, which I think is awesome. It sounds like a really valuable tool. I'm always curious sometimes, at least it's happened to us. I'm sure it's happened to you is, you know, there's the kind of core intended purpose of your solution and then sometimes kind of customers will find clever, interesting ways that they use it.

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Brock Weeks [00:25:42]:

So I'm curious, have you seen operators using Savi in a way that maybe, you know, surprised you?

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:49]:

Yeah. Early on it was the manual tracking of these customer experience things.

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Brock Weeks [00:25:55]:

Like, wow.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:56]:

You'Re actually using a lot of just watching video. Like, what are you doing? Like, oh, well, we have our team go in with stopwatches and start the experience of the customer and track it because we made an operational change and we want to see what's happening right when we first designed it, never intended it for that.

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Brock Weeks [00:26:13]:

Wow, okay.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:14]:

That's an interesting, great insight forum. Other than that, there's I'm sure a myriad of things what I didn't realize in the beginning and we were worried about it being pegged as a, you know, and there's nothing wrong with Osprey, it's a key part of a business. But it's more of like hey, big brother stick mentality. And we've been so impressed and encouraged by the brands that embrace it as. No, this is all about coaching and stopping negative behaviors and improving. It's not about I'm gonna got you moment.

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Brock Weeks [00:26:45]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:45]:

It's hey, you're doing amazing and all of these things. Let's work on this. Because everyone wants to know where they can improve.

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Brock Weeks [00:26:53]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:54]:

And what other industry. I mean you've been doing this for a long time. I'm curious on your perspective on it. One of the things I love most about the hospitality industry. I've met so many VP of Ops, COOs, CEOs of these large businesses that started as like a frontline employee. Where else do you have that upward growth trajectory?

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Brock Weeks [00:27:15]:

That's true, actually. That's true. I never thought of it like that. But you're right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:18]:

Like it's phenomenal. It's so to me, like love it. Like man, you're really lifting people up.

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Brock Weeks [00:27:24]:

Yeah, it's so true.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:25]:

How do you catch those people when they're young and cultivate an experience and know like, hey, we've this person here.

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Brock Weeks [00:27:32]:

We need to keep them because we got a winner. Yeah, yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:34]:

There's a winner of someone who's operating hundreds of locations or even 10.

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Brock Weeks [00:27:38]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:38]:

They've got a 19 year old, 20, 22 year old kid out there just crushing it for their brand. We want that surfaced and highlighted so they can cultivate and embrace and that's that talent.

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Brock Weeks [00:27:51]:

So yeah, no, well said. It was funny actually in my notes, you know, I was preparing notes ahead of time and it's, it's something I actually really like that, that you said which was basically or you've spoken about but be, you know, using video data to coach, not to police. And I think that's a, that's a great distinction. Right. Like of course, security. Security. If you know, so place gets broken into, of course he'll use it to police. But from day to day it's like your angle is hey, we're here to coach to improve you know, either processes or just improve metrics.

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Brock Weeks [00:28:22]:

It's not about policing, which. Which I like. I think it's. It's a really fresh perspective. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:27]:

And keep the human element there. Like catch. If someone's doing something wrong, help them catch it and correct it. When it's. They gave away, you know, 10 to $20 worth of food they shouldn't have been doing before it became what we see in the news of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

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Brock Weeks [00:28:44]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:44]:

Now that person's got a record. Right. Their whole life trajectory changed where you could have just caught them and corrected them and said, hey, like these things you're doing, you may not even actually understand originally that you're stealing. Like, take that corrective coaching environment and change the trajectory of that individual versus just.

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Brock Weeks [00:29:00]:

Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. And, you know, one thing that's important, why I think is always important, is, you know, staying connected. So personally, I still do, like a handful of demos I usually try to do with the larger customers, but I'll still do a handful of demos a month. Keeps me close to the customers. Understanding pain. Right. Like just solution.

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Brock Weeks [00:29:19]:

Like, it's nice to have that. So just something that I always want to be somewhat part of. Like, I never want to not. Do not do it. Obviously, from the early days of doing all the sales to now, things have changed. But I'm curious, from your perspective, how do you stay connected to the. The realities of, you know, you know, that, that frontline staff, especially as your company is growing, right? It's. It's growing.

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Brock Weeks [00:29:41]:

You're getting bigger and bigger deals. How do you not lose touch with that kind of core frontline, you know, worker, I guess.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:48]:

Yeah. There's two parts of our business that I will never stop being involved with, as, you know, you have to. Right. Just get reports and delegate other opportunities. But I still, I will always spend a lot of time at trade shows or involved in demos with conversations with customers because that's where the great ideas come from. You start to aggregate over time. It's like, okay, I've been to five different shows. I've heard this same thing over again.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:14]:

Right. My notes. And it's like, guys, this is a problem here. Like, do we. Are we able to solve it or no? And is there a different way that this could be solved? So I agree with you, like, 100%. Front lines out there talking with customers. And then the second is product with our product team, because you have these really brilliant people that join your team from a, you know, whether it's a computer science.

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Brock Weeks [00:30:41]:

Right, right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:42]:

And you have them on your team and you can do some really, really cool stuff. I mean, some of the inventory stuff, you're doing it for you. It's awesome. Yeah, but like, how does it work for someone working in a restaurant actually impact roi? And so spending time like, well, I'm going to go out in the restaurant and observe. I actually joked around with one of our customers the other day. I'm like, hey, you want to, you know, hire me and train me for a week so I can get in there and really actually understand this problem? I probably would be a terrible employee, so they wouldn't do that. Yeah, I, I think the insight you can gain from talking to customers, observing and then asking questions, man. Yeah, well, we sometimes, I'm curious, do you feel like sometimes in the technology space we come in and we're like, we've got the answer and it's like zero understanding of their business and we've fallen into that trap before.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:32]:

And when you just go and listen and ask questions and truly understand.

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Brock Weeks [00:31:36]:

Exactly.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:36]:

Oh, wow. That's actually something we didn't think was really cool.

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Brock Weeks [00:31:40]:

Exactly.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:41]:

Edge actually solves a really big problem.

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Brock Weeks [00:31:43]:

Yeah, I think, I think, I think that's been kind of a core kind of WISK philosophies. Like we're generally. The whole team is quite curious. So I think, you know, might stem from me maybe because I'm a very curious guy. But I think the whole team does a great job of that culture of like asking and kind of pushing a bit and why do you do it that way? And okay. And why and, and it's, it's, it's, it's a good perspective to have because I think sometimes, you know, there's the whole example like if, you know, if, if Henry Ford would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Right. So it's like there is some truth to not just taking exactly what your customer says.

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Brock Weeks [00:32:23]:

I want this. But it's also like good to listen and to dig and to, you know, ask why a few times. And put. Because to your point, when you start seeing patterns, I think that's when it gets interesting. You start kind of uncovering layers, which I think is, is, is super cool. And we've seen it. And the funny thing, I know this happened here, but the funny thing is even to this day at risk and I always tell this, our product team, I'm like, guys, it's funny but sometimes the stuff that is low lift product wise and like Whatever. We don't think twice about it.

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Brock Weeks [00:32:53]:

Is the stuff that on a demo gets the eyes open and wow, that's so cool. And the stuff that took us like six months, that is super. And maybe it's crucial, but, like, they gloss over. They couldn't care less about. And don't get me wrong, there's nuances. There's like fundamental things you have to do. But to this day, there's a few things in the wish that make people like, I'll give you one example. One is so simple.

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Brock Weeks [00:33:11]:

It's so simple. But it's just like iPhone, camera scanning a bottle, bottle pops up on phone. People are like, wow. And like, I'm over. Because it's like, it's just a barcode scanner, you know, or a Bluetooth scale. People freak out. Or, you know, we have a calculator now that's one of my favorite because it's so subtle and it was like an afterthought. Like, oh, guys, sometimes people are counting a lot of like, beer bottles, and we noticed that they would like, quit the app, open their calculator and say, okay, 10 bottles times three.

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Brock Weeks [00:33:39]:

Let's just add a button to like, pop up calculator and app. That one to this day gets the, oh, my God, I can use a calculator. So it's funny, but I think there's also a lesson there where sometimes it's like product guys or engineers, we're thinking like 20 steps ahead. And sometimes to your point, the consumer is just like, I just want to know when they open today. And we're thinking like, aggregate data across. And they're just like, I just want to know, did they show up to work today? And it's like, there's a bit of middle ground. Because of course you want to be thinking about the future and not just, you know, solving tiny problems, but you also want to listen. Because sometimes what the client wants is kind of realistic, you know?

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:16]:

Yeah. And like, I think one of the things we've found is asking like, okay, great, yes, the why is diving okay, now what are you going to do with it? What is your team? Walk me through that process of. And that's where for us, so much insight has come. Because then you start to go, oh, it's actually not right. Because it's hard for all of us to articulate, well, this is actually what I want. Right. We're all communicating and pinpointing exactly what that is. But when you start to go through the whole process, okay, you're asking for this why? What's the problem.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:50]:

Okay, now it's solved for you. What are you doing with it? And right. That's when you can start to go, oh, you don't need more horses, you actually want them more comfortable.

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Brock Weeks [00:34:57]:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's awesome. And you know, as, as we're slowly wrapping up one, one thing I always like to kind of dive into just the future of hospitality tech basically. And it's, you know, it's, it's evolving, it's following every day. There's some stuff we're seeing today that's really cool and. But I always like to just get people's perspectives. So from your point of view, you're working in a hospitality, you're in the tech space, you're doing some really cool stuff with video and AI, obviously. So in your eyes, where do you kind of see like, I guess two questions.

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Brock Weeks [00:35:27]:

One is just what current kind of technology is piquing your curiosity? Is there anything that's out there right now that you're like, this stuff is.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:34]:

Cool to step back? I actually like three themes is what I am going to see. Is what I see way wrong on this. Right.

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Brock Weeks [00:35:42]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:43]:

One, you're going to need to see deeper integration or consolidation of platforms into platforms because AI becomes really powerful. But if all of the information siloed and transparent.

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Brock Weeks [00:35:54]:

Yeah, Yep.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:55]:

And I think one of the things that's driven by that and we like all have to be very, very careful of and cognizant of is subscription fatigue is real. I feel it in my business. We have all of these different tools and it's like, okay, which ones actually are really necessary and sometimes due to. Right. If we're, all we're doing is listening to the finance side of the house, it's like, no, no, no. Like, yeah, you could charge for that. But like we just need to. We are, we got to be able to make money and keep business and everyone.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:26]:

But it's like, no, no, you can provide value here. So I actually think you're going to see general technology spend flatten out or that consolidation actually drive savings for the brands because it costs money to manage a vendor and a piece of process. So I think you'll see consolidation, deeper integration partnerships amongst like Wisk and savvies are going to eventually need to integrate because the data needs to exist for the end and we shouldn't be the ones. Yeah, let's do cool things in our platforms and in our data warehouses. But we need to make sure it's really easy to normalize and provide all of that data up to the end operator. So that's where those deeper integrations I.

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Brock Weeks [00:37:06]:

Think, yeah, I could see.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:07]:

And then I really genuinely think you're going to see a push back to personal engagement.

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Brock Weeks [00:37:14]:

Okay, tell me more.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:16]:

Because technology is abstracting away the mundane, which is. Right. A kiosk just extracts away the mundane of ordering. Right. And what can I get you? But like, it doesn't stop. That experience of my kids in the store and interacting with employees and things like that I still love at Chick Fil A, when I take my kids in there, they come around and greet, how's everything going? And they bring my kids a sticker like that makes my kids a day. Like, that's why I can make a chicken sandwich at home. And I think the technology is going to abstract away that mundane, or should it won't place people, it's going to amplify them so that hospitality, whether it's guests with guests and the operator or team members within the operations, it's going to be more coaching, more personal engagement as a lot of these things can start to be automated away.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:11]:

And I mean, that's my hope. I think generally humanity is craving connection.

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Brock Weeks [00:38:17]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:18]:

Just in general, and I'm a big believer in that, that we have that if you've spent too much time isolated, all of the data shows there's a loneliness epidemic going on. If you listen to the US Surgeon General and people crave that real world interaction.

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Brock Weeks [00:38:33]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:34]:

If you don't have those friends, if you don't have like those people, you can go get that at a restaurant and share a meal, food, interacting with.

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Brock Weeks [00:38:41]:

Yeah. No, it's. Totally agree. I mean, listen, it's, it's, it's. There's a reason that generally the, the worst punishment is solitary confinement. Right. I mean, maybe short of like capital punishment, but in general, in general, like solitary confinement is the worst of the worst. And it, it's for a reason.

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Brock Weeks [00:38:57]:

Because as a human, I think connection's so important. And I'm with you. I mean, I think there's kind of two schools generally. And I'm more in the school of like, hey, at least on a personal level, on a business level, like, how could we leverage AI to give people time back to focus on the things they love? It's not to replace them. It's like replace the part that they don't like, which might be reviewing a variance report or understanding where they counted something wrong. Like the part that sucks, not the part like we're not trying to take away the fun stuff. We're like, let me take away the boring, tedious. Yeah.

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Brock Weeks [00:39:25]:

And I think that's why personally, like I've been optimistic about AI because on a day to day, like I use it to your point, help me with a lot of mundane tasks and you know, things that could be easy like emailing and things like that. But I feel personally it's allowed me to be more creative and so I think that's, that's where you kind of get excited. You know, the flip side is like, everything's bad and it's going to replace me and like this sucks. I'm, you know, I'm a little more on the optimistic side and I think a reason for that is I, I almost feel more like liberated in the sense that, you know, I feel like, okay now with all these AI tools, it's like for at least the way I'm looking at it is I started thinking of like, you know, an orchestra and now I can actually like orchestrate a lot better because I'm not getting sucked into the super minute details that, you know, are important. And yeah, so for me it's been great because a lot of things I didn't like and I wasn't great at to be simple, but example, building a PowerPoint but I would visualize but like building it would take me time. Whereas like some people could just operationally like, like good. They're like, I had a problem. Beautiful PowerPoint or presentation in like two hours.

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Brock Weeks [00:40:36]:

It would take me like two days. Now with tools I'm like, I feel empowered because I know what I want. I can describe it, I can prompt it. And it's like now I'm like, I feel like yes, I got a superpower. So it's funny, I guess depending on, you know, your personality type, you probably could also experience AI in a different way. But for me it's been generally quite positive because it's, it's, it's been very much a balancing act of a lot of things I didn't like. Whereas like.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:02]:

Yeah, oh no, sorry. What's your favorite tool for creating that? Those presents.

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Brock Weeks [00:41:06]:

So for the presentation specifically, I've been using a tool called Gamma. Been great.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:10]:

Okay.

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Brock Weeks [00:41:10]:

Been solid. Solid. It's. Yeah. And I'll use like either a chat, GPT, a Claude or whatever. I always, honestly, I usually switch because I always like to just see like how they perform differently. So I'm always switching like even on my phone I got like grock and there's a deep sea like five zero, you know, my app because I like to Test and I find little nuances but like I'm seeing patterns sometimes. Okay, this is better when it's email stuff related.

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Brock Weeks [00:41:35]:

This one's stronger when it's technical problems. But what I'll do with Gamma as an example is like I'll just come up with a nice prompt so it'll help me. So I'll go through like, hey, I'm building a deck. The deck has to have this, this. I wanted to make sure the slides include this. I want to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Turn this into a prompt. I can put into an 8 and 1 second prompt.

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Brock Weeks [00:41:54]:

I use that in Gamma because you could just put a quick problem. But I find if you take a very good prompt and put into Gamma, the slides are like perfect and I just have my designer touch it up. So like within an hour I end up having like a beautiful presentation that's like, you know, so that's just one example. But there's things like that I think that are just. It's nice, I think if you can find a way to buy back time and in your case, right with the, with the videos and buying back people time from searching through hours of videos, I think that's a win.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:24]:

Yeah. What, what do you see? Tech. I mean, I know we're getting to the end.

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Brock Weeks [00:42:27]:

Yeah, no worries.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:28]:

Where do you see it going? I'm curious.

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Brock Weeks [00:42:30]:

Yeah, I mean, look, I actually agree with you. I think in a weird way as things become more and more automated and everything's like more outsourced to AI and AI and I, I think people are going to create that connection. And one of my predictions, I know that generally, you know, full service restaurants is not the, you know, the growing category compared to, you know, QSR multi unit chains that are heavily, etc. But I do think like the full service restaurant or the bar like I think are going to make a comeback in the sense that like do I think, you know, economic reasons that, you know, all of a sudden fine dining is going to skyrocket? Maybe not, maybe not. People aren't going to be able to afford fine dining, you know, but I think the idea of even if it's a casual, but the sit down, I think people are going to start missing that. Just sitting down with your friends over a beer or a drink or a meal. So I think that aspect of it, whether it's fast, casual or fancier, I think that that's going to come back and become more important. I agree with you.

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Brock Weeks [00:43:26]:

Your consolidation thing, I see that happening for me the, and I'm Biased because I'm in the kind of like back of house space with WISK and inventory management. But I do see like that as a practical use of AI like for me I think those are the most useful things, at least short term with all the accounting stuff, inventory stuff, you know, scheduling, maybe like all the kind of tedious, boring but super important stuff, you know, P. Ls and blah blah, blah. So I think that's that and to your point, video tracking. So a lot of the back of house stuff I think is going to be more and more automated and that might include two tools, right? Like you, the. I forget what it's called, but the avocado slicer from Chipotle there that makes the guaca. So it'll be like robotic. So I think that is already happening, is going to continue happening.

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Brock Weeks [00:44:08]:

I'm curious to see how the front of house will evolve, you know, like as kiosks become more popular and drive through experience. I'm curious to see like to your point, does it fully replace the human experience and you're walking into a place and not seeing any humans at a certain point or is it just that now the human experience is a different level and it's, you know, so I'm curious to see where that, that leads. That, that, that's where I'm at. But for me, definitely back house, I see like, no, no slowing down a lot of companies and a lot of innovation. And to be honest, I love it because I know most restaurateurs didn't get into their business for their passion of spreadsheets, right? Like they got into their, their hospitality space to be hospitable and then, and then they slowly realize, holy, there's so much important, boring but necessary stuff I got to do on the back end. So I think that's why like, in a weird way it excites me because it's like all this back aisle stuff, whether it's WISK or accounting stuff or whatever, I know will free up these, these professionals, hospitality professionals time and they can actually start focusing. So I'm, I'm excited for that part. As that gets more automated, what's going to happen when all these people have more time on their hands? We'll see.

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Brock Weeks [00:45:21]:

We'll see. But with that said, honestly, Brock, it was great. So, so as we wrap up, I just want to say once again, first of all, thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing your experience. For people listening in, we're going to put the links. But just as a reminder, get Savi.com Savi is s a V I setup was a lot simpler than even I thought. For the proof of concept, ship you one little device, connect it, you're good to go. So for people on the fence, I just recommend check it out getSavi.com worst case, you do a demo, you see what's possible.

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Brock Weeks [00:45:51]:

If it's not the right fit, it's not the right fit. But the best case is you now have something that can really help your business and help you make better decisions. So Brock, with that said, thank you again for joining the WISKing it all podcast.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:04]:

Absolutely. Sincerely thanks for having me. I really appreciate it and really enjoyed the conversation.

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Brock Weeks [00:46:08]:

Yeah, this is fun. If you want to learn more about WISK, head to Wisk AI and book a deposit.

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