• Quick-service and fast-food restaurants typically collect data on customers' purchasing behaviors.
• With the help of AI, they can now leverage their data to better manage inventory and operations.
• This article is part of "How AI Is Changing Everything: Supply Chain," a series on innovations in logistics.

Fast-food chain Juici Patties, which operates more than 70 locations in Florida, New York, and Jamaica, started on the island nation as a family kitchen in 1978. When the chain expanded into the US last year, it experienced stockouts.

Executives knew they needed a different strategy — one with advanced technology to scale their business, manage franchises, and sell thousands of patties each day, Stuart Levy, the company's chief technology officer, told Business Insider.

Today, Juici Patties uses AI's predictive and proactive features to prevent disruptions before they occur.

"AI is helping to keep our distribution centers stocked with enough of our branded packaging to meet demand," Levy said.

Indeed, AI technology is making its way into quick-service and fast-casual restaurant operations. AI can use data to form predictions about customer orders, then generate insights for leaders on how to manage inventory and operations.

Domino's Pizza and Microsoft teamed up to create a generative-AI assistant that saves managers time on inventory management and ingredient ordering. Starbucks also inked a deal with Microsoft to use genAI in its product development. And Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, and others, partnered with Nvidia on AI for internal tasks such as labor management and analytics processing.

For many quick-service restaurants, "their entire brand is built on speed and efficiency," said Spencer Michiel, the restaurant technology advisor at Back of House, a resource for restaurant tech solutions. "If there's anything that can help them with speed, efficiency, and lower cost, they're going to jump all over it."

Data-rich restaurants layer on AI

Restaurants are "extremely data-rich," Michiel said, which makes them well-suited to adopt AI. Major fast-food chains already have standard operating procedures to purchase based on demand, but AI takes that to the next level with forecasting abilities that more accurately predict demand and inform supply.

With AI's forecasting capabilities, restaurants can predict what customers might order and use this data to buy ingredients, a notoriously tricky part of restaurant supply chain management.

"The biggest thing that restaurants do badly is purchase," said Stephen Zagor, a consultant focused on restaurants and food businesses and an adjunct assistant professor of business at Columbia Business School.

AI draws from quick-service restaurants' internal point-of-sale data, such as sales trends and which products customers tend to buy at the same time. Then, an AI algorithm combines this data with external factors like the weather or local events.

"The beauty of AI is it's taking forecasted demand and turning that into a reaction all the way through the supply chain," Zagor said.

For example, AI can deliver granular data by location. For a restaurant right off an interstate, AI could predict that travel will slow down on certain days. Seeing that prediction, restaurant managers could decide to drop their inventory levels and purchase fewer items, Zagor said.

He named McDonald's as one quick-service restaurant that uses AI to maximize everything from its point-of-sale to its supply chain. The fast-food giant has partnered with Google Cloud and IBM on various AI solutions.

When it comes to data and AI, the level of standardization across major chains puts them at an advantage over smaller franchises and independent restaurants.

A mom-and-pop restaurant may not have "the time, the bandwidth, the skills, the knowledge" to gather data and create an action plan, Michiel said. Subscribing to software can cost hundreds of dollars each month, presenting financial barriers to small businesses. Any new back-of-house or supply chain software would need to integrate with existing point-of-sale systems. If done incorrectly, the result could be data loss or lag, "and it's going to be frustrating," Michiel said.

Serving up efficiency and financial gains

AI's predictive power can also help minimize waste in restaurant supply chains. If a restaurant orders too much, it could have to discard unused or expired food. This could require the business to increase meal costs to compensate for the loss, according to Michiel.

"Food waste is just a killer," Michiel said. "Over-ordering is straight loss. There's no way you're going to recover that cost."

Controlling costs is especially critical for fast-food chains, which order at scale and sell low-priced products. Making just 5 cents more on an item, or making 5 cents fewer, "is a big deal," Zagor said.

AI can also promote cost savings by flagging if a particular ingredient swap could result in higher profits without sacrificing taste or quality. The technology "smooths out" a restaurant's ability to purchase inventory while still keeping customer satisfaction top of mind, Zagor said.

"You can get good profit, and the customer is going to be happy," Zagor said. "It's win-win."

Levy said Juici Patties' AI implementation into its point-of-sale system and supply chain was time-consuming, involved some growing pains, and sparked fears about replacing the workforce with AI. He acknowledged that "AI isn't flawless."

Now that the technology is in place, though, Juici Patties has seen a boost in operational efficiency, Levy said. In one instance, the AI revealed that customers wanted to purchase food earlier in the day, before Juici Patties locations were open.

"We were missing potential sales during earlier hours of the day," Levy said. The restaurant chain acted upon that information and adjusted its opening times. The result: "a consistent increase in daily sales," Levy said.

The overwhelming consensus on Capitol Hill was that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) would only delay President Trump's "big, beautiful bill" by about an hour. As noon approached on Thursday, that expectation was shattered.

Why it matters: For months, the Democratic base has been demanding their party's leaders "fight harder" and use every tool at their disposal to stymie the GOP agenda. In the eyes of many lawmakers, this is Jeffries delivering.

• Jeffries blasted the GOP's marquee tax and spending bill as an "immoral document," vowing to "stand up and push back against it with everything we have on behalf of the American people."
• As of late Thursday morning, Jeffries was on track to surpass then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's (R-Calif.) record-breaking, 8-and-a-half hour speech to delay the Build Back Better vote in 2021.
• If Jeffries keeps speaking until 1:23pm ET, he will have set a new record.

What we're hearing: One of Jeffries' central motivations, numerous Democratic sources told Axios, was to ensure that Republicans were forced to pass the bill during daylight hours and not in the dead of night.

• Jeffries said in his speech: "I ask the question, if Republicans were so proud of this one big, ugly bill, why did debate begin at 3:28am in the morning?"
• "This is about fighting for the American people ... forcing it into the daylight and telling some stories about the real impacts," House Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told Axios.

Zoom in: Jeffries spoke with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) ahead of the speech to warn him about his plans, two sources familiar with the discussion told Axios on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation.

• The House Democratic leader communicated that he was "just going to do an hour," one of the sources said, but that it "may be longer now."
• Another source said Jeffries made that decision "when he learned [Johnson] was going to stay all night until he got the votes."

What he's saying: "Budgets are moral documents, and in our view ... budgets should be designed to lift people up," Jeffries said in his speech.

• "This reckless Republican budget that we are debating right now on the floor on the House of Representatives tears people down ... and every should vote 'no' against it," he said.
• Jeffries was consistently surrounded by dozens of House Democratic colleagues, who raucously applauded him throughout his speech.

Yes, but: The Democratic leader did face a bit of frustration from his caucus for leaving even his inner circle in the dark about his plans.

• "No one is upset Hakeem wanted to do this, but to not tell members, 'be prepared, book multiple flights, be flexible,'" one House Democrat vented, grumbling that it is particularly hard to rebook flights around the July 4 holiday.
• Another House Democrat fumed that a "heads up would have been nice."

Between the lines: Jeffries' marathon speech comes after Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) delivered a 25-hour filibuster in April that earned him plaudits from the Democrats' grassroots as a resistance hero.

• Later that month, Jeffries and Booker held a day-long sit-in on the Capitol steps in protest of Republicans' fiscal plans.

• Nvidia's stock has been on a tear lately — but some people still don't know how to pronounce the company's name.
• While some pronounce it "NUH-vid-ee-uh," the correct pronunciation is "en-VID-ee-uh."
• Nvidia's name, inspired by the Latin word "invidia," reflects its founders' hope to evoke envy.

You might hear people mentioning Nvidia more this week. The stock is trading at an all-time high. It's officially the most valuable company in the world. But are people pronouncing it correctly?

Despite the company dominating headlines and being at the forefront of many conversations around AI, some people still don't know how to pronounce its name.

Luckily, Nvidia cleared the confusion on its website and explained the proper pronunciation. We're sorry to tell you, but if you're one of the people calling the tech giant "NUH-vid-ee-uh," you've been saying it wrong.

The proper pronunciation of Nvidia is "en-VID-ee-uh," according to the company.

Founded by CEO Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem in 1993, the chipmaker's name actually came from its lack of a name, Fortune previously reported. While the trio focused on developing the company, they put its title on the back burner and named files "NV" as an abbreviation for the "next version."

The three eventually decided on NVision before realizing the name was taken by a toilet-paper manufacturing company, The New Yorker reported. Finally, Huang suggested the chipmaker's current name, a spinoff of the word "invidia," which means envy in Latin, the report said.

Huang and the founders had dreams of creating a product that would make rivals "green with envy," Nvidia cofounder Priem said. Given Nvidia has a nearly $3.9 trillion market cap and a long line of tech giants and startups angling for its latest AI chips, it seems as if that vision has come to fruition.

To celebrate Nvidia's stock price hitting $100 years ago, Huang got the company's logo tattooed on his arm — an experience he later said "hurts way more than anybody tells you."

Check out the video below to hear Huang pronounce the name at Nvidia's 2024 keynote.

• NYC's mayoral frontrunner has a plan to overhaul the city's property tax system.
• It involves an analysis of billionaire Ken Griffin's 220 Central Park South apartment.
• Here's what it could mean for NYC homeowners from Staten Island to the Bronx.

When Ken Griffin purchased the most expensive home in America in 2019, it came with a hidden discount.

The palatial four-floor apartment at 220 Central Park South, which cost the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel nearly $240 million, is taxed at about half the rate of the average condo in the city, data shows.

Now, Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old self-described socialist who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, wants Griffin — and scores of other wealthy homeowners in the city — to pay more. His plan, if instituted, could upend tax bills from Staten Island to Billionaire's Row in Manhattan.

In a policy memo published by his campaign, Mamdani pointed to Griffin's Central Park South apartment as an example of why he thinks an overhaul of the city's byzantine system is necessary.

Without mentioning Griffin by name, the memo called out the taxes charged for an apartment at 220 Central Park South that cost $228 million, what the memo described as "the most expensive home ever sold in the United States." (News reports at the time of the sale said Griffin bought the apartment for $238 million.)

The memo proposed taxing the apartment, and others like it across the city, closer to their actual sales values versus the complex formulas currently used by the city's Department of Finance, which valued Griffin's apartment at just $15 million on his most recent tax bill. Mamdani's memo said this change would lead to an annual property tax bill on Griffin's Central Park pad of $3 million — more than three times what it currently pays. Other New Yorkers could also see their costs rise — or fall — depending on where they live and the sales value of their homes.

A spokesperson for Griffin declined to comment. Records from the city's Department of Finance show Griffin's Central Park property was charged $841,000 in property taxes for 2025/26.

The $841,000 bill means that Griffin pays 35 cents of taxes per hundred dollars of the apartment's sales value. That's less than half the tax burden paid by condo owners across the city on average, according to a 2021 report by a tax reform commission tapped by the previous NYC mayor, Bill de Blasio. The average condo in the city pays 74 cents of taxes per $100 of sales value, according to the report.

Raising taxes on Brooklyn brownstones

Mamdani said the city's current method, which calculates values for condos and coops by comparing them with rentals, "heavily favors luxury and super-luxury apartments."

He said he would embrace reforms recommended by the 2021 tax commission, which suggested NYC use a "sales-based methodology to value all properties." That methodology, he said, would lower tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica in Queens and Brownsville in Brooklyn "while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones."

Tax experts agreed that the current tax system tends to favor tony neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, Greenwich Village, and Park Slope. Poorer and working-class communities in the Bronx and Staten Island have historically paid more as a percentage of the sales value of their real estate, they said.

Sebastian Hallum Clarke, a product manager at Google Maps who has studied the city's property tax system in his free time, highlighted that dichotomy in a blog post. Clarke detailed how a 96-unit rental apartment building in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights paid nearly six times as much in annual property taxes as a single-family Upper East Side mansion, even though the city's Department of Finance estimates similar values — $6.6 million versus $5.5 million — for the two.

"Every dollar in cost for a rental gets passed on ultimately to the renters themselves," Clarke said. It's "a broken system that is just completely unfair in terms of how much tax different classes of property are paying."

Part of the disparity is attributable to state-mandated caps that prevent the city from raising the assessed value on one- to three-family homes by more than 6% per year and 20% over five years.

It remains to be seen whether Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, prioritizes property tax reform in an agenda packed with bold promises, including free bus service, a rent freeze, and affordable housing development. Other mayors have pledged to fix the system only to punt on the complex and politically fraught issue.

"The Dinkins administration did a property tax reform commission," said Martha Stark, a former commissioner of the Department of Finance during Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty, noting how long the system has been under scrutiny.

"I just can't imagine that Mamdani would elevate that to the top of his priority list in the first term," said James Parrott, an economist who was on the 2021 tax advisory commission.