Fuel up and connect. Join fellow operators and industry leaders for a relaxed breakfast to discuss the day’s priorities before the sessions kick off.

Collect your MURTEC attendee and sponsor badges at the MURTEC registration desk. Badges are required for access to all of today's MURTEC activities.

Note that 1-day AI Summit at MURTEC badges are valid for Wednesday, March 11.

Dine Brands Global, Inc. operates some of the world’s most recognized restaurant concepts—IHOP, Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill + Bar, and Fuzzy’s Taco Shop—through an extensive franchise network. Join Acting CIO Chris Padilla as he discusses the company’s technology strategy -- including innovative AI deployments -- for enhancing operational efficiency, supporting franchisee success, and improving the guest journey across casual and family dining experiences.

Restaurant leaders today face no shortage of ideas, platforms, and partners promising to improve the guest experience. But when everything is a priority, nothing truly is. In an environment defined by rapid innovation and constant choice, focus has become a leadership discipline — and a competitive advantage. This executive panel brings together senior restaurant leaders to explore how they decide what actually matters most, and how those decisions shape ownership of the guest experience across technology, operations, marketing, and frontline teams.

Through real-world examples, panelists will discuss how they:

·       Set priorities and make tradeoffs amid growing tech stacks and competing initiatives

·       Balance innovation with operational realities without losing sight of the guest

·       Define — and align around — true ownership of the guest experience when responsibility is shared across functions and partners

The conversation will examine where accountability lives when the experience succeeds — and when it breaks — and how disciplined focus enables clearer ownership, stronger execution, and better outcomes for guests, teams, and brands.

MURTEC celebrates the remarkable leaders and trailblazers who are shaping the future of the restaurant technology space and the rising stars who represent the next generation of industry leadership. This engaging session is a must for anyone who’s passionate about innovation.

Sol Rashidi — Forbes “AI Maverick & Visionary of the 21st Century,” former Amazon tech executive, and 3x TEDx speaker — shares hard-learned lessons from over a decade at the forefront of enterprise AI. She’ll show business leaders how to normalize the conversation around AI, including governance, decision-making, and the human implications of automation. Attendees will take away clear frameworks for identifying where AI truly adds value. With concrete examples from Fortune 100 deployments and a clear roadmap for measuring impact, this keynote will highlight AI strategies that amplify human judgment, institutional knowledge, and leadership capacity.

Maximize your time with a dual-purpose lunch. Enjoy a high-end meal while joining a guided tour of the exhibit hall, designed to get you in front of the specific tech solutions your business needs most.

Exhibit hall tours available! Sign up in advance to reserve your spot. 
 

Open to restaurant operators and select sponsors. Earn 5 tickets to the MURTEC Swag Shop for full session participation!

This Innovation Forum is built for discovery and peer-to-peer exchange. We begin with four rapid-fire case studies that move beyond the "what" to the "how," deconstructing the specific strategies these restaurants used to drive high-performance operations. The room then transforms into a dynamic workshop where participants rotate through several rounds of moderated discussion tables. This is your opportunity to learn more about the success stories of interest, sitting directly with peers and solution providers to deconstruct the implementation and collaborate on shared challenges.

• Hospitality Without the Chaos. Learn how Barcelona Wine Bar—20 cities, chef-driven menus, 400+ wine labels—partnered with SpotOn to reduced labor chaos through guardrails and automation. Discover the labor levers that protect margin: preventing overtime creep, reducing punch exceptions and payroll rework, standardizing tips, and strengthening compliance.
   
• Scalable Commerce for Franchisee Growth: Groucho’s Deli shares how an 84-year-old South Carolina sandwich shop transformed operations across 31 locations by consolidating a fragmented tech stack into Square’s unified commerce platform. Hear how the company achieved operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and positioned itself for scalable franchise growth through integrated payments, omnichannel management, and strategic partner integrations.
   
• The Flexibility of Unified Data: Ziggi's Coffee and Paytronix discuss the strategic value of all-in-one solutions that remain flexible enough to enhance diverse tech stacks. Their roundtable will explore how platform flexibility impacts the accessibility of customer data, and how marketing teams can access and leverage that data for personalized engagement.
   
• Case Study in Advanced Loyalty: Details coming soon!

RTN has already delivered seven industry standards and frameworks to help operators and technology providers reduce friction, improve interoperability, and move faster. As restaurant technology continues to evolve, with AI, integrations, and data complexity accelerating, the next phase of innovation requires deeper industry collaboration.

In this interactive working session, operators and vendors will build on RTN’s existing foundation to identify emerging challenges and help design the next generation of RTN workgroups. Participants will collaborate in small groups to translate real-world operational and technology pain points into actionable ideas that can shape future standards and frameworks.

This session is designed to move beyond discussion and into creation. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how RTN drives practical innovation, and how they can play a direct role in defining what comes next for restaurant technology.

This session unpacks how tap-to-order, network tokenization, and wallet-linked loyalty are reshaping the economics of guest experience, turning payments from a cost center into a strategic growth lever.

As technology's role in the restaurant expands beyond the traditional stack, innovative brands are deploying autonomous tools to solve complex physical and logistical challenges. This session explores two distinct, high-impact case studies in how emerging tech is redefining the operational standard:

• Case Study 1: Real-Time Intelligence in the Kitchen. Jack Ahrens (Kura Sushi USA) dives into how IoT, edge computing, and computer vision are being utilized to monitor assembly and order accuracy in real-time—protecting margins and ensuring quality at scale.
• Case Study 2: The Final Mile in the Sky. Leon Davoyan (Dave’s Hot Chicken) shares the roadmap behind their recent drone delivery pilot, exploring the strategic ROI, the logistical hurdles, and the future of autonomous off-premise fulfillment.

Join us for a practical look at how these non-traditional technologies are moving from experimental concepts to essential operational assets.

Grab a caffeine boost and hit the floor. This is your dedicated window to explore the exhibit hall, meet with partners, and catch up with peers between sessions.

We’ll unpack the art of negotiating vendor relationships that drive quality, innovation, and scalability in a fast-growing restaurant brand, including frameworks and real-world examples for partnering with strategic suppliers and technology vendors.
 

Watch the industry's most promising innovators go head-to-head. Our Start-Up Alley finalists take the stage to pitch their disruptive tech in a high-stakes battle to see who will be crowned the winner.

Cap off the day with a drink in hand. This reception is the perfect time to circle back with exhibitors for deeper dives or connect with colleagues to decompress after the day’s programming.

Step into MURTEC After Dark: Electric Connections, an after-hours experience set in a neon-lit lounge above the Las Vegas Strip. Unwind with electric entertainment, signature sips, and bold bites while connecting with fellow restaurant-tech leaders in a vibrant, relaxed atmosphere. Designed to spark real conversations and meaningful connections, this is where the MURTEC community comes together after hours—Vegas style.

Start your day with breakfast and networking in the MURTEC Exhibit Hall, open to all MURTEC and AI Summit at MURTEC attendees and sponsors from 8:00 AM - 8:50 AM. 

Following breakfast, all education sessions, lunch, and networking will take place in the AI Summit at MURTEC meeting spaces.

1--Day AI Summit at MURTEC badge holders should collect their badge at the main MURTEC registration desk. 

As AI dominates the business conversation, it can be challenging to separate hype from reality. This foundational session demystifies AI, providing a clear, jargon-free understanding of its core concepts, capabilities, and limitations and orients restaurant leadership on how to approach the opportunity at the organizational level.

Everyone wants AI. Few are prepared for it.  AI outcomes are only as strong as the infrastructure beneath them. This session cuts through the hype to focus on the unglamorous but essential work: clean data models, integration maturity, governance discipline, and standards alignment.  Learn the practical checkpoints that determine whether AI becomes competitive advantage, or costly experimentation.

A knowledge base is more than a data lake; it's information in context that grows as the organization learns. This session covers how structured data, unstructured data, team knowledge, and real-world signals converge into a single hub that powers agentic AI — and why organizations that build this layer now will have an advantage that's almost impossible to replicate later.
 

Step into the future during this networking break. Visit our AI Pop-Up Studio to see live demonstrations of agentic workflows and real-world AI applications in a low-pressure, hands-on environment.

As threat actors increasingly leverage AI to launch sophisticated, large-scale attacks—from deepfakes and advanced phishing to autonomous malware—traditional defenses are no longer enough. The next frontier in cybersecurity is not just reacting, but proactively countering AI with AI.
 

In this guided exercise in building an agent, attendees will participate; using an LLM of their choosing (or follow along with two side-by-side examples on screen) to learn how to build an agentic workflow. 
 

Join us for an exclusive AI Summit lunch in our Pop-Up Studio—network, learn, and get a taste of the future of restaurant tech.

Learn how the Chief Marketing Officer at Capriotti's Sandwich Shop transformed a daily firehose of information and choices into strategic advantage by training a personal AI bot on her decision patterns, priorities, and business instincts — redefining what leadership looks like in the age of AI.
 

In a fireside chat, Otonomus Hotel CEO and Founder Philippe Ziade will discuss how it leverages a proprietary AI "brain" to deliver hyper-personalized guest journeys by creating a digital avatar for every guest, allowing the property to predict preferences and pre-configure room settings before arrival. Beyond the guest experience, its AI automates complex operational tasks and workforce management, freeing staff to focus entirely on high-touch service. 

Experience a high-velocity field report from the brands successfully operationalizing AI at scale. This session is a structured showcase of real-world use cases designed to help restaurant leaders navigate the complexities of AI adoption. Each brand will have 10 minutes to break down their implementation across this framework: The Concept, The Complexities, The Solution, and The Results.

You'll walk away with peer-validated perspectives on selecting and scaling AI tools.

• Taco John’s | The Mobile Growth Play: How AI-assisted geolocation drove an increase in mobile orders
• &pizza and Latitude Food Group | The Efficiency Play: How conversational AI and automation allowed a brand to streamline IT support. 
• Shipley Do-Nuts | The Frictionless Guest Play: How integrating Voice AI into the mobile app and leveraging AI guest engagement layers are redefining the order-to-pickup journey.
• Dave’s Hot Chicken | The Marketplace Play: How AI-driven insights are used to optimize marketing spend and channel performance across third-party marketplaces.

In this final 15-minute "lightning wrap-up," we put our own technology to the test. Watch as we use Agentic AI to synthesize the hundreds of insights shared today into a single, high-level Strategic Priority Checklist. No fluff, no delay—just a citation-backed action plan for senior leaders to take back to their boardrooms on Monday morning.

You’ve seen the tech and heard from peers who are diving in; now it’s time to talk strategy. Join us in the AI Pop-up Studio for a post-Summit happy hour. Rub elbows with our AI Summit experts, catch up with colleagues, and enjoy cocktails as we celebrate the close of a high-impact day of innovation.