As artificial intelligence and other emerging technology continues to evolve, franchise brands are harnessing these innovations to improve efficiencies for franchisees and help their brands stand out from the pack. Franchise Canada spoke to three brands who have found success with AI tools and other new tech innovations
By Joelle Kidd
Fresh Burger
At Fresh Burger, the aim is to sell burgers—no gimmicks, “no mumbo jumbo,” says Jacques Kavafian, founder, president, and CEO. The brand differentiates itself in the fast-casual marketplace with a limited menu focused on excellent quality. “Do few things but be good at what you do,” explains Kavafian.
Despite the classic menu, which hinges on traditional burgers and fries, Fresh Burger doesn’t shy away from novelty when it comes to systems operation. The brand has long been at the forefront of harnessing new technologies to streamline efficiency for its franchisees.
In stores, Fresh Burger has implemented self-serve kiosks for customer orders, as well as digital gift cards and an online loyalty program. Behind the scenes, franchisees use digital tools to manage payroll and scheduling.
Recently, the brand has adopted an AI tool called EZeeAssist, which compiles all documents, training videos, and operations manuals and allows them to be easily searchable. “A franchisee can just text any question—‘How do I make poutine?’—to what we call the Fresh Burger bot. And then, within eight seconds, you’ll get a text message showing you a video and the procedures about how to make it,” says Kavafian. “I think it’s the best product out there.”
While the brand is eager to implement new technologies, Kavafian notes that, in the sea of new tech products vying for business owners’ attention, it’s important to look for tools that are going to be useful and improve efficiency. “Everything we do is based on making sure our franchisees will make more money,” he adds.
Starting with one of the brand’s corporate stores, Fresh Burger is implementing time-tracking software that allows employees to clock in using their phone and facial recognition software, within 50 feet of a beacon housed in the store. The brand is also looking to expand the use of digital ordering kiosks, which have been a hit with younger customers.
It’s all about being open to innovation, says Kavafian. “You’re either going to adopt technology, or you’re going to disappear.” He says, “If there’s a technology out there that will make our business better, we will use it.”
Chatime Canada
With more than 1,500 locations around the globe, Chatime’s popular bubble tea is recognized worldwide. For Chatime Canada, which boasts more than one hundred locations across the country, franchisee success necessitates staying on the cutting edge.
“Our customers are very digitally savvy and tech-savvy,” says Thomas Wong, co-founder and president of Kevito Group, the parent company of Chatime Canada. “They’re much younger than the average Canadian consumer, they’re digital natives. They’re looking for us to constantly be on the forefront of things.”
To this end, the brand has been implementing internal, customized tools that harness AI with the goal of greater efficiency within the franchise system. To do this, the brand hired a data engineer to consolidate core metrics like point of sale information, loyalty databases, and external information like customer feedback surveys and online reviews.
“One of the most practical applications of AI has centred around applying it to read and understand our customer feedback,” explains Wong. Using a large language model, Chatime’s custom-built AI tool can synthesize information from across the web.
While this kind of social media monitoring is not new to the industry, Wong notes, using AI to digest so much information has the obvious benefit of speed at a large scale.
“It’s very difficult for any one of our executives to actually be in touch with each one of those 100 stores, so just like other mid-sized chains, we have to deploy tools to help us really get a better sense of what’s happening,” says Wong. “One of the issues historically has been there’s such an increasing torrent of customer feedback that comes at use these days, between digital and traditional channels.”
AI summaries have helped save time, but Wong sees another benefit: uncovering trends and unexpected connections. “We realized we had a problem with the calibration of one of our pieces of equipment in our stores that was resulting in an impact to product quality,” he notes by way of example. “Honestly, we didn’t really notice it until we started getting the AI summaries, which pointed out that these were not just individual, one-off customer complaints about this product quality issue: there’s a trend here.”
The AI tool has been so helpful for Chatime that Wong is launching a similar product to other brands in the food service space. Called MealMatrix, it will soon be available to other foodservice brands in the North American market.
“We’re in a fortunate place to be a bit on the forefront of some of this work, and seeing the opportunities available,” says Wong. “We’ll see how the future unfolds.”
PropertyGuys.com
Since 1998, the mission of PropertyGuys.com has always been to help home buyers and sellers make more money by offering flexible options for buying and listing homes that “unbundle” real estate services. “We charge a flat fee based on the level of service the home seller selects, not a commission based on the value of the home,” explains Ken LeBlanc, the brand’s president.
Having started as a dot-com company more than two decades ago, the brand has always been “on the forefront of leveraging technology to transform the real estate industry,” LeBlanc notes. Today, PropertyGuys.com’s pioneering tools for customers and franchisees include real-time home evaluations delivered online with an instant estimate for home value, a digital home renovation modelling tool that uses AI to help customers envision what the property would look like with different renovations and redecorations, and online training and support that means franchisees in any location can have full access to consistent training and development programs.
“Even prior to the pandemic, we did a lot of online training,” LeBlanc notes, which put the brand ahead of the game when the business had to shift entirely online. Expanding online offerings during COVID “basically opened up the borders for us,” he says. “We could go anywhere in the world and offer that training and support.”
In 2025, PropertyGuys.com is introducing two new AI-powered tools to help franchisee development. The first is a conversational support tool that can respond to franchisees’ questions about operations instantly. “We have a 178-page operational manual. And right now, if people have questions, they have to comb through it, maybe look at the table of contents and find a section,” says LeBlanc. With the help of an AI chatbot that can scan the manual’s contents, any franchisee question can be answered immediately.
Another new tool is an AI-powered role-playing bot that will simulate real-world scenarios for franchisees and their teams, allowing them to practice anything from customer support dialogue to making a sale, to presenting at a home show. “It’s a game changer for preparing franchisees for the day-to-day challenge of running their business,” says LeBlanc.
Along with those new tools, AI is useful for creating content like social media campaigns, digital marketing, and listings, and for analyzing sales call recordings to pinpoint more effective scripts. Another tool, which LeBlanc learned about at a Canadian Franchise Association (CFA) webinar, called NotebookLM, creates expanded audio conversations based on the brand’s podcasts.
With all these innovations, LeBlanc says the aim is to support the human beings behind the brand, saving franchisees time and energy and helping make their businesses more efficient. “For me, the biggest thing that AI is helping us do is allow us to do our jobs faster and better. It’s not going to replace anybody working here. It just creates efficiency … and it allows us to scale our business. So that’s why we’re embracing AI so much, and so are our franchisees—no one has any fear about it.”
