Burrito bowls at Chipotle may start to look drastically identical thanks to artificial intelligence.
Brian Niccol, Chipotle’s CEO, said that the company has been testing a guacamole prepping robot and its seeing early results.
“There’s definitely a future where we can be a lot more accurate in giving people consistent portion sizes, whether it’s double guac on the side or in your bowl,” Niccol said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
Niccol, who took helm of the company back in 2018, said that “between vision, technology, and AI,” the company can “become a lot more accurate, without having to give up any speed in doing it.”
In July 2023, Chipotle began testing the Autocado robot, essentially a robot that could cut, core, and peel avocados. In March 2022, Chipotle deployed “Chippy,” a tortilla chip-making robot.
According to Niccol, Chippy didn’t pan out the way Chipotle thought it would.
“The biggest challenge was the cleaning of it,” Niccol said. “It just became way too cumbersome for the team to clean it.”
The Autocado robots are not being deployed just yet, Niccol said, but noted that the company is “already on our third or fourth prototype.”
“Now we’re like okay, this is ready to go into a restaurant,” Niccol said.
Raising curtains
The fast casual chain is planning to open between 285 and 315 new restaurants this year, Chipotle’s Niccol said. The company has an estimated 3,400 locations.
Looking further ahead, Niccol said that in the next decade the chain could have at least 7,000 U.S. restaurants or more.
Niccol said that the restaurant chain could eventually make its way into the China market, but it may be too early to tell.
“I don’t know the answer to that yet,” Niccol said. “My instincts tell me yes. But we have a long way to go to prove that out.”