Ep 14 Part 1: AI in the Restaurant Industry: Hype or Helpful?

Host Tal Clark, CEO of Instant Financial, interviews Marcus Wasdin, founder of the Wasdin Company, about restaurant transformation and AI adoption. Wasdin recounts entering restaurants through Church’s Chicken, serving as the Atlanta Hawks’ first CIO during a $200M arena renovation that led to top NBA guest experience ratings, and later running a restaurant tech business line before moving into advisory work. They discuss how AI is driving a surge of restaurant tech solutions and potentially creating “AI fatigue,” as operators want outcomes while investors want more AI operations. Key operator challenges remain food and labor costs, talent attraction/retention, and driving traffic amid rising check averages. Wasdin explains the AI adoption cycle in restaurants today, citing costly drive-through voice AI and mixed in-restaurant adoption of natural-language analytics tools.00:00 Welcome to the Podcast00:37 Meet Marcus Wasdin02:08 Career Origins in Restaurants03:01 Atlanta Hawks Tech Turnaround03:54 Three Lenses on Hospitality06:20 AI Boom and Tool Fragmentation09:58 Operator Pain Points Today12:03 Why POS and HCM Changes Win16:48 AI Reality Check and Use Cases21:26 Part Two Tease and WrapInstant Financial: instant.coConnect with Tal Clark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tal-clark-a60776b/ Connect with Marcus Wasdin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuswasdin/ References:The Wasdin Company: www.wasdincompany.com The Atlanta Hawks: https://www.nba.com/hawks/ Par Technology: https://partech.com/ Inspire Brands: https://inspirebrands.com/ Church's Chicken: https://www.churchs.com/our-story Underserved Report: https://www.instant.co/2026-restaurant-study/ Center for Generational Kinetics: https://genhq.com/