Ryan Wilkinson, Vice President of Marketing at Primanti Bros. Restaurant & Bar, spoke on a panel at FCES 2023 called "Embracing AI without Killing Your Budget.”

Wilkinson explained that there are soft and concrete benefits of AI. The soft benefit is that it frees up time by getting analyses done faster. Business stakeholders like Wilkinson are able to go to internal analysts and ask about specific business problems, and they're able to find answers in a more timely way. This efficiency helps them do more.

Concretely, AI is helping Primanti Bros. with driving a positive ROI on their advertising investments. By presenting customers with the minimum viable offer they need to get them to come back, and presenting that offer at the right time in the right channel, Primanti Bros. is able to make their ad campaigns more cost effective.

Tools like Upside stack on top of those initiatives to drive more, incremental transactions. Wilkinson says, "at the end of the day, we don't have to move a ton of people [though our doors]. It's really just about moving a few people a day over the line. And that gets us to that 4% [year-over-year growth]."