Jack in the Box CIO to depart in May

Dive Brief:

Jack in the Box will be "separating" from Andrew Martin, the SVP and CIO who joined the company in 2016, effective May 7, according to a Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company did not respond to a request for additional information on Martin's departure.
Prior to joining Jack in the Box, Martin served as EVP and CIO for Lytx from October 2011 until December 2014 and held IT leadership positions at Sony Electronics and PepsiCo, according to a company biography.
The fast-food chain recently migrated all of its on-premise data centers to cloud services with plans to implement machine learning models to improve service time and food costs, according to an August announcement from AWS.

Dive Insight:

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jack in the Box crafted a technology roadmap set on modernizing and digitizing its offerings.

CEO Darin Harris said the fast-food restaurant is "continuing to evolve" offerings such as its mobile app to become more agile in a November 2020 earnings call. The company is planning an ML integration for personalized recommendations on the app.

But its data storage and analytics transformations have made a mark as a cost-cutting foundation for future innovation.

"As we think about investing in our data platforms and enhancing through data science, all those are things that will either grow sales or enhance our operational execution to drive margin," Harris said in a February earnings call.

Through data warehousing efforts, Jack in the Box automated IT administration tasks and cut hosting costs, according to the AWS announcement. Hosting its offering in the cloud set the stage for digital customer service efforts and ML implementation.

Jack in the Box also uses ML insights to train employees on customer interactions and tally product feedback for future iteration.

Moving to the cloud "gives us the ability to be a more flexible, resilient, and data-driven organization, which is essential for our business to understand and adjust to the impacts of challenges such as COVID-19, flexibly scaling and contracting our resources to optimize how we operate," Martin said of the AWS partnership.