Mexican-themed fast food chain Guzman y Gomez is rolling out new retail hardware across its 225 restaurants in Australia to incorporate agentic AI into its restaurant ordering systems.
Guzman y Gomez CTO Bryce Maybury (centre) alongside Aware Super CTO Richard Exton at the Zendesk Future of Service Event in Sydney 2026.
itnews.com.au
The kitchen display system, supplied by Hewlett-Packard and used by the chain’s 16,000 restaurant employees, will feature neural processors and memory, making them capable of accommodating AI workloads on-site.
Chief technology officer Bryce Maybury said the rollout, which starts next month, is a precursor to introducing agentic AI into the chain’s ordering system, starting with kitchen workflow management.
Specifically, the restaurant wants to use agentic AI to start finetuning the way its kitchens manage production lines respond to fluctuations in customer demand.
The overall aim, Maybury said, is to match the restaurant’s unofficial motto “hotter, fresher, faster” which serves as a benchmark.
Typically, each of the chain’s outlets has two lines operating during peak periods.
The chain is currently rolling out the technology that will give its order management systems the algorithmic smarts needed to allocate orders in ways that keeps the lines balanced and operating against its food quality benchmark.
“We’re rolling out the actual core platform, which is doing the algorithms, determining which side of the line to send things down, load balancing. It gives our kitchens full control of orders down to what type [to send down lines],” Maybury said.
The agentic system to come later is expected to go further, processing more signals and data to better anticipate when to open and close lines, and notify kitchen managers.
“It takes out the cognitive load from a restaurant manager to determine, ‘Now, I should open line two because there’s more traffic coming in’ … It anticipates that based on the velocity of both what we’re seeing currently but also from historical data,” Maybury said.
Maybury said that the AI capability isn’t at this stage intended to make determinations around human rostering which, for now, will rely on traditional anticipate of foot traffic coming through the door.
“It’s more around getting a little bit more granular. Can we tell them: ‘At 12.30, you should open this line’ rather than at, say, one o’clock. Or you should open it at 11.30 to prime it and get it ready,” Maybury said.
For now, humans will have the final say on whether to close down a line.
The company is also working on a prototype of an AI module that can be plugged in for its kitchen management systems to make more of its cooking “on demand”.
It’s expected to be able to make forecasts in real-time to advise its kitchen staff when they’re low on inventory and make calls on when to start replenishing and cooking ingredients.
Ultimately, the ordering system’s ability to analyse what’s happening in the chain’s kitchens could lead to more automation of its supply chain business processes, Maybury said.
The new kitchen display hardware is currently in nine of the chain’s 225 restaurants.
Shipments needed to complete the rollout entered Australia two weeks ago and are expected to be installed across its restaurants over six weeks from the start of May.
