Why Your Next POS Shouldn’t Be a POS

Matt Wampler (Intro): The National Cash Register Corporation started back in 1884. Today you know it as NCR, whose flagship product Aloha has been the most deployed point of sale system on the planet since 1994. On today’s episode of the Restaurant AI Podcast, I am joined by Benny Tadele, president of restaurants at NCR. He came up through the payments world and joined NCR to lead a ground-up rebuild in 2023. In our conversation, we get into why Benny thinks that buying a POS is the wrong decision entirely, what a modern technology foundation actually looks like, and why he spent a weekend trying to get an AI agent to order food and what it taught him about how ready the industry really is. But before we dive in, a quick word from our sponsor, ClearCOGS. ClearCOGS helps restaurants turn the data they already have into practical daily guidance for prep, ordering, and labor so that operators can make better decisions before the day gets away. Now I give you my conversation with Benny Tadele.

Matt Wampler: Benny, good to have you on, man.

Benny Tadele: Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Matt Wampler: I I got such a kick out of two tech guys. We try and get on a video call and it takes us twenty minutes to try and figure this thing out. Swear technology has become so complicated, you getting on a video card becomes difficult.

Benny Tadele: Yeah. Sometimes you think that technology is is supposed to make our lives easier, but the more you add, if you're not careful, you actually end up complicating your own life. I thought that, you know, like you say, twenty minutes trying to figure out how to get on a video, there's a joke somewhere in there. Yeah.

Matt Wampler: One hundred percent. And like I said before, I swear the common thread is the better somebody is at technology, the better the programmer is, the worse they are at figuring out how to get on a video call, unmute themselves, you know, point the camera in the right direction. So I it's it's a testament. You must be an incredibly smart guy.

Benny Tadele: I was gonna say very kind. I'll take the compliment.

Matt Wampler: Well well, give me the rundown on the POS market today. Catch me up of what's going on in the POS world.

Benny Tadele: Yeah. I mean twenty years ago, thirty years ago, we we started NCI voic started the POS journey for restaurants at the minimum. The flagship product, Aloha started in nineteen ninety-four, so middle of the nineties. the world of POS has dramatically significantly changed since then. but even if you push back, actually NCR started, our roots go back to the what, 140 years, 145 years. We started in the era of the cash register. the company helped commercialize and then scale that technology and really transformed how merchants operated since then. but we've come a long way. I mean, today's world of POS, in instead of a on the one side, the POS being the center of the world where every commerce happens, have dramatically changed. The POS is just one channel. Just as probably an overemphasis, but it is one channel, and we have a proliferation of other channels that are becoming even more important. digital channels, delivery channels, kiosk channels, self-service channels, and now you have a gente commerce channels and and so on. so the POS has transformed from being the center of the world to being an important part, but a part of the overall ecosystem within the restaurant. I think that's one. The other one is you know, it used to be a there is a level of pain that you can and would bear as a as a restaurant operator to operate your point of sale because life was really not complicated. To the example of our you know, when we started how much technology we have to fidget to get this working, the more technology we've added into restaurants, particularly again on the digital world, customers expectations, consumers expectation of what interaction at the at the storefront or the restaurant front looks like. you know, you have now delivery coming into the restaurant, you have you know, first party and third party, you have the kiosk being ordered, people ordering on the mobile while sitting in the restaurants. All of this has complicated on what the point of sale has to keep up. and so as a result, you have lots of innovations happening in and around the point of sale. And then as a result, there is a lot of change and and and churn happening within restaurant operators to look what's that. next level of technology I need to have not only to catch up but to simplify, but not only to simplify, but to anticipate what the future is going to hold. Nobody knows what's what's going to happen, but lots of change.

Matt Wampler: I want to dig into what the future of the POS looks like. But before we even get there, you know, it it feels like you guys or POS's in general started out as, you know, the cash register. I was there for the business, there to reconcile. And as we've become increasingly digital, you know, you're really helping facilitate customer payments, you know, helping facilitate the customer's experience. How do you think about, you know, the product from the customer versus the restaurant? And in some ways, you know, who is it that you're trying to serve? You know, I would think in in a lot of ways, the better you can make it for someone being able to order at a restaurant. Is good for the restaurant, but there's kind of some nuance there.

Benny Tadele: Yeah. I think you know ultimately NCR Voorgs, we are a platform-powered leader in unified commerce for shopping and dining. And then if you tease that out, that's that's sort of in a nutshell of the summary of what we do. the ultimate customer are the shoppers and the diners. And why? without the shopper and the diner, Actually interacting, shopping and dining, there isn't really a restaurant or a retailer. And without them, there isn't really an NCR VoIC. So the ultimate lens that we look at our offering and solutions is how can you create an environment for the shoppers and diners to have a frictionless experience? But to your point, that is one side of the coin because the other side of the coin is the more you facilitate a frictionless experience for the employee. And for the company that's the restaurant brand, the more they can do for the for the experience. So our platform, our solution from a product lens perspective, we look at how do we create you know the best experience for the restaurant customers and how do we allow the restaurants to remove friction in their business processes and their technology stack, as well as the ultimate outcome they want to drive for their for their for their customers.

Matt Wampler: So walk me through as a business. POS company. There are so many restaurants out there that are trying to figure out what POS am I going to have. And it it almost feels like you're getting married, right? Like if the average what's the average marriage lasts like seven years? I feel like POS lasts a little longer than that. So like you're you're really making a commitment when I go to a POS. How should a restaurant think about the right POS for them? Because there's not one brand for everybody, but like, how do you think about that? How should a restaurant think about?

Benny Tadele: I mean, that's that's a great question, Matt. I actually will flip the question you know, slightly differently. I I don't think you should be making a POS decision, period. I think thinking about the POS change as a POS change is so 2000s, 2015, whatever you want to call it, it's it's so archaic. I think what you should think about is what kind of platform do I need to have so that I have a sustainable growth trajectory. For my technology needs in the future. Why is that? It is the the process made. Your your interaction with your customers used to be 95, 98, 90 at best inside the restaurant by the POS when you used to be a brand 15, 10, 20 years ago. Now that's not the case anymore. And that's going to continue to change, meaning you have all these really important channels that need to happen so that you can market. Create demand for your customers. That's the first thing. So I need to understand my customers and the way I understand them. I have a connected platform that actually facilitates all the interconnectedness of the technology stack that I have. Then get them into the restaurant, get them to my mobile app, got them to an aggregator so that I can serve the order. And then by the way, I can also I need to also optimize my backup house production, that is kitchen. So all of that, to me, it's a platform choice. And not a point of sale choice. So the way brands should think about is what platform do I need to have? What foundation do I need to lay so that my life is easier? My life, you know, I can change and pivot very quickly. I can anticipate the future. And then I'm not, you know, I'm not necessarily married where I I can't change very quickly.

Matt Wampler: I can get behind that. I can get the idea of like when I bought my first POS, it was 2010, right? I think we spent like $35,000 for the POS. And like, you know, they had to run cables everywhere, your networking cabinet. And that was going to be the POS. Like it wasn't going to change. Today you're buying a platform. You're expecting it just like SaaS services to improve, you know, and get better every year. But what does a good foundation look like? You know, it's easy to say a good foundation, but like most restaurant operators, they're not tech people. Right. It they're they're probably looking at what's it gonna cost me in credit card fees and like do I like the look of it more so than the foundation? So walk me through a good foundation.

Benny Tadele: I think a good foundation, I mean all of those things by by the way you just mentioned are are important as well. I I wouldn't discredit those. I think but there are a few other elements you have to to consider in the process. You know, the first one is the foundation has to be architecturally sound. Architecture has become a lot more important than just feature functionalities. You think about in today's world, what a year ago you have, maybe actually less than a year ago, you have the AI apocalypse in the stock market because people think building any type of software, starting with Salesforce CRM, is very easy because you have now AI. I mean, now we're finding out there's a lot more complexity to it than that. I think the market overreacted, but there is some truth to it as well. Like feature functionality building is not the the most difficult thing. So You shouldn't probably start with that can the button do this and do I have a feature to connect that? But architecturally, how is it built? how can it get you know keep updated? How much management does it take to upgrade to the next version to connect it to an ecosystem, to react to the needs of AI, which is becoming more and more important? All of these things are important. So architecture is one. And second one is yeah, sorry.

Matt Wampler: Well, let's let's stay on the architecture for a second. When you say architecture, that you're you're obviously, you know, a very technical guy, i.e., we couldn't get the video call going. when I hear extra architecture and I hear AI, I think data and organized data. Is that what you mean by architecture?

Benny Tadele: I I that is one of the things that I say, but I think it's more than AI and data. I mean, to me, you have two or three things in the architecture discussion. one is the fundamental principles of how the different pieces of the solution come together. You know, a very you know easy example is you heard the term monolithic versus microservices. And monolithic is I build the whole thing. Windows applications are monolithic as an example, meaning every time I want to change one thing, you have to update the whole application. and so the testing is rigorous, the update process is painful. Or another example to think about is if you have one light bulb in your house that lights the entire house, something goes wrong with the light bulb. we've we've we've all done it. It's it's the Christmas lights. When one of them goes out and the whole strand goes out.

Matt Wampler: Spot on, spot on.

Benny Tadele: Versus microservices are instead of building everything in one monolithic way, these are interconnected systems that actually behave and work together. So in case something wrong goes wrong with one of them. or you want to change one of them or you want to update one of them, the hole doesn't come down. The hole actually continues to operate and you can easily change that. So that is resiliency, security, you know, scale, all that, but also goes to what you say, data and interoperability and and integration and AI. Why? Because microservices fundamental principle is all of those components will integrate with each other to give data in a standard way. in in an organized fashion. And not only that, if I want to if I want to intercept data, manipulate data, interact with data, create different experiences, I can easily do that. I don't have to mess with the whole thing. So the granularity of that is also, you know, innovation and data and an AI. so that's to me is is is architecture. What is the philosophy of how you build up the whole solution?

Matt Wampler: All right, this might be going in the weeds, but it's almost out of perverse curiosity. You're 145-year-old brand that is servicing far greater than just restaurants. I have to imagine that the architecture needs to change. But you guys are masters at doing it a certain way. How hard is it leading an organization that's been around that long that probably has like, you know, preconceived notions of this is how the architecture needs to be and actually like change it into the future?

Benny Tadele: Yeah, you know, organizational, I mean, it's been studied in great details. Organizational inertia is one of the toughest things to change. Just like, you know, I don't know how old you are, Matt, but the older you get, the harder it is to change your behavior and your preferences and your predispositions. And you tend to be very opinionated.

Matt Wampler: And the older you get, the more you become yourself. Right. Like, the more it's you, but more you.

Benny Tadele: That's right, that's right. So organizational inertia is one of the top things. And you think about our company, NCR Vorax, like you said, 145 years ago, we started in the cash register realm and then throughout the years acquired several software companies that gave us a lot of breadth. It grew into a conglomerate. But breadth also means lack of focus to a certain extent where you needed to focus. So we have to do some hard things to reinvent, to modernize and to start this journey for me, specifically in the restaurant space, the Aloha Next journey. And I would say three things, I think. One is the company's shape had to fundamentally change and again connecting it back to humans. I don't know if you know the psychology trick. Most of the time, the older you get, it's hard to change. But there's one thing that would make you change and that is life altering experiences. It is sometimes the loss of someone or an alteration of your body. People lose limbs as an example, and you become a very different person or, you know, you lose a child. There's a lot of things that happen, sometimes sad, sometimes hard, but sometimes good opportunities that will change you as a human. The same thing. For us, a split happened that instead of an $8 billion company, now we're two and a half billion dollar company, huge change. And instead of focusing on these five, six different conglomerates, we actually focus on retail and restaurant retail. That is it. So that's one.

Matt Wampler: Well I'll take, I'll take breaking up the company instead of children dying. So at least, at least that's the. Get it going.

Benny Tadele: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that is, that is a better one. I got morbid here for a second.

Matt Wampler: No, but you guys, you guys break up and it's, it's an altering, you know, it's one of those decision points in the sand. Everything's different. Everyone views the world differently. When was that?

Benny Tadele: That was at the end of 2023. Right. October 2023 is where the company Covid.

Matt Wampler: Hits and you guys get divorced.

Benny Tadele: That's right. And then one of the things that happened post the divorce is as we also changed the entire management structure of the company, including our CEO Jim, who started actually the beginning of last year. So he's been here now a little over a year and a half. Most of the executive team is brand new to the company. So there is a management change. How the brain thinks, how the cultural top down drive works. The third probably big change very relevant to what we're discussing. So there are other changes that we can talk about. The relevant change is in those years we really haven't had a chief product officer. So you know, a company that was our product team used to be really residing in the businesses versus as a standalone product organization. And just for a second think about that. Software companies who doesn't have a chief product officer and that really changed the mentality of a product led organization. The discussions are different, the thought process is different, the planning, the rigor that goes into that. And one of the good things that came out of that is this architecture discussion. We used to have a retail product and a restaurant product. Even though we use the same platform, we no longer have that. So we're able to marry a lot of the lessons learned, a lot of the solutions and capabilities we have on the retail side, part of the microservices edge infrastructure, all of this. So you write very hard to change organizational inertia, but when you have life altering experiences, you know, definitely you're able to do it.

Matt Wampler: All right, so I do want to finish the. We. I think we only got through architecture as being important points, but so I want to come back to that in just a second. I think, you know what I'm hearing is you guys kind of split as a company right after Covid. You brought in New blood. You brought a product officer and that's all leading up to. Is it Aloha next? Is that the new POS thing that's coming out? So finish off the other things. It's architecture and yet a couple others, the important basis and then I want to hear about aloha next.

Benny Tadele: Okay. Yeah. So I think one of the things you have to evaluate is the architecture. The second one is I think you have to understand how easy is the system to manage. And this is particularly true for enterprise brands that have multi unit operators. Whether it's multi geography, multi concept, multi brand within the same umbrella. Simple things like how do I manage my menu, my pricing, my promotion, my labor schedules, all of this. It is no longer just a POS terminal. People tend to think the terminal is the most important thing that shows up. Actually, it probably is one of the simplest things. It is how do I affect change? How do I manage my business so that I can actually drive hospitality? My main job is not to manage technology, it is to have time to do hospitality. So how easy is it to manage as a system? I think that's another one. And the third one is, like I say, no one knows the future. So how easy is it to change? How easy is it to integrate? How easy is it to incorporate new systems? You as my supplier, my provider, my technology partner, how easy is it for you to make changes, show me proof points, introducing new features, new capabilities, can the system catch up? And in all of that is, yeah,.

Matt Wampler: That goes to the point of you have to kind of decide when you're doing that whether you want to be an Apple and have a closed ecosystem. I think of Toast as being that world or like a, you know, Square, which is kind of a Google that's open. Right. I imagine that you guys sit there in this kind of thought process of what are we going to be and what is the pos and wrestle with close first open. Outside of where you land on it, how did you think through that problem and come to a conclusion?

Benny Tadele: The it is a hard problem. It is a very hard problem. I mean I wouldn't make it easy in a Toast versus Clover or even versus NCR voics. And I don't know if there's one simple problem, but I think we, you know, you gotta start from the customer that you're trying to serve and then you gotta start from saying what needs am I trying to solve for the customer? And then what are the best ways to solve that? I'll give you an example. I think when it comes to Open or closed enterprises all the way. At the very far end, enterprise versus very small operators. SMBs is a very different mindset. At the simplest form, if you are an SMB operator, I actually don't want vessel breed. All I want is, I want this thing to work. I mean just make it work. Solve my problem, I don't know how you solve it and then make it, you know, price is a pretty big component. Make it cheap in a cost effective way. That is the problem you're trying to solve. And to a large extent, open ecosystem doesn't necessarily have a huge influence that the smaller you go, one system all cohesive, solve as many problems as you can for me and then we can go by. As long as it's cost effective. When you go to brands that are multinational, but maybe even multi regional or maybe even just multi cities, the actual equation changes. Number one, they have already established workflows. Workflow disruption and technology adoption is a huge disruptive events. Yeah, modernization to me is, is, is lack. It has to have lack of disruption, meaning the guest experience. But even the employee and the operate experience has to happen in later stage of the modernization. So the infrastructure have to be modernized, the architecture, the technology while maintaining. You don't have to train thousands of employees.

Matt Wampler: I mean just as simple, just as simple as if you move a button somewhere, it confuses, I mean like how often do you reorganize, organize your, your app screen on your phone and then you're just lost for like weeks. Right. Like every little change affects all those restaurants.

Benny Tadele: That's, that's a great example, Matt. And we actually talk about this in the, in the new Aloha next world. One of the things we're seeing is actually maintaining the ability to say you can get in the early phase of your modernization the same screen. And by the way, changing a screen is a low cost effort in the new architecture. But at the beginning you don't want to take that because you don't want to retrain your thousands of employees and introduce a change before you're actually ready for it. So I think the higher you go in the brand scale, the open you need to be because there will be more players, more workflows, more complexity that are going to be anticipated. That doesn't mean that it's an all or nothing. I think there is a middle ground between the two in how you look at your platform.

Matt Wampler: All right, I'm going to derail the conversation for a second just because I got a question for you. So one of the things I have Liked about Vibe coding or, you know, AI coding is it feels like you can allow the person closest to the UI to basically build the UI that they want right for them, which is great. The closer the end user you can get that's designing that, the better. It's like I don't. And you know, everyone has something different and you as an organization don't want to develop a different UI for everyone. How is it even in the realm of possibilities, a world where, you know, a general manager or let's call it a brand, could just Vibe code the UI of their POS and you know, have the POS support that? Or is that like, you know, just architecturally something that you know will never get to the point where people are vibe coding their POS and how it all the buttons are and such.

Benny Tadele: I think you definitely are derailing the conversation, which I like, because this actually brings me to the Aloha Next conversation and why said architecture is important and what microservices mean. So to illustrate in the Aloha Next architecture, one of the things that's decoupled and then standalone is the UI of the point of sale. It is react native. So anybody with more or less like a web design capability can actually design the ui. And it's open, not open source, but open architecture. So we do allow brands to design and develop their own UI to go on top of the point of sale and the service is the same. We also provide ease a divide. Coach, you don't have to Vibe code if you don't want to. You can actually use our design studio. I think the principle is exactly what you said, which is the person closest to the UI is the one that you want to design for their own operational needs. When I meet with customers, it is interesting, like in the Aloha world, how very married is not the right term, but how very attached people are to the UI they designed 10 years ago. And the more I talk, I understand why. The reason is they just didn't sit in a room, design it, release it and stick to it. It actually went through a lot of tweaking and fidgeting and looking at their operation and outcome and so on. And they have arrived at the point where most of their operational training manuals, their systems, how they think even about their menu and their kitchen production, all that is tied to that. And so they don't want to change that. So you're right. I think giving them the tools is definitely one of the things that we are doing and the architecture is what allows you to do that it's a low cost change effort.

Matt Wampler: Benny, were there like three things when you set out to do Aloha Next that you said these are like the three things we want to do different that we feel like set us up for the future?

Benny Tadele: I don't know.

Matt Wampler: Is it just a bunch of little things stacked on top?

Benny Tadele: No, no, I think there were fundamental things. I don't know if there are three things, but maybe let me go through the top. The top, most important things. The first one is, I mean, I gave you three things as what you should look at to select. I think the first one is architecture. We definitely knew and said, you know, Aloha has been around for 30 years, 40 years it served. It's not an indictment of the past because it's the largest deploy point of sale in the world in the restaurant space, but it has run its course from an architecture perspective.

Matt Wampler: Hey, it's a test, It's a testament. It's going on forever. I mean, like people have had Aloha in their restaurants for decades and it's still working.

Benny Tadele: That's right. I mean, it's crazy that sometimes, especially in Asia, I travel and I find customers running our 2000, 2006 version, Aloha 6. I have, you know, some really large branding 12. So it is a testament to how stable it was. But that architecture has run its course. And now for the things you and I are discussing, you need a new architecture. So one is definitely the architecture component needed to change, needed to be unified, needed to be part of our Voyix Commerce Platform. So it's not just the point of sale at the center of the world, but it's part of the ecosystem where the platform is the center of the world. So one is architecture, the second one is. Have you worked with Aloha before?

Matt Wampler: We have.

Benny Tadele: You have.

Matt Wampler: Okay, I've worked with Aloha, pulling agents to go pull stuff off the server again. It's still working, baby.

Benny Tadele: Working. It is working. I love it. So you would know then cfc, cmc, the server behind the restaurant and all of that. And whilst Aloha was great at what it does, very feature rich, probably the most feature rich point of sale, managing it is not the easiest task. Like if you want to create a new menu item, you want to do a price update. These are, you know, these are complicated efforts. So the second thing was a completely revamped and simplified management for the back end. So the enterprise management is completely revamped. So that's the.

Matt Wampler: Yeah, your architecture, easy to management and then change and let's let's talk on the change, but let's, let's take an AI approach to it and how you think about that technology wave. Because man, I feels like anybody launching a new product or a new company today, it's a really tough time to do it because the ground is moving beneath your feet and you don't know what the world's going to be like in 12 months.

Benny Tadele: That's right, yeah. So you have to design your system with that exact philosophy. You don't know what's going to happen. So it had better be easy to change, to adopt, to evolve. So one of the things that we're doing is in the change side is the way that the systems are coming together is with the anticipation of agentic commerce, integration of new AI capabilities. You know, for example, one of the things we, the capability we demonstrated, you know, publicly is how do you connect ordering to inventory, to your marketing engine, to your pricing engine. And then you as an operator don't have a thing. Because today, you know, simple example is a bakery or baked goods restaurant like a donut shop. You know, your inventory set up in the morning, you count it, but then as the day goes on, it depletes, you know, daily you have to count or hour by hour or when you sell and then you have to go update inventory systems. And then when something runs out, you have to 86 items in every channel manually. But if you connect all of this, we demonstrated a capability again because of the architecture. You can integrate these things where you have a camera vision watching your donut inventory. And so as they deplete, it actually updates. And if you set up rules as an operator, if something is not moving fast enough to avoid wastage, it can actually recommend promotion and then maybe even push the promotion to your DMB or your marketing engine. Or if it goes down, it can say based on your rules again, adjust price all the way to actual 86 in the item or bring it up onto the kitchen screen to say you need to bake more goods. So having an open architecture where you can integrate new capabilities because the models are moving fast, even consumer grade cameras are moving fast. So all of these things means you got to design your product to anticipate these. Let me pause there and then I'll talk about, you know, one other thing.

Matt Wampler: You got to reconcile this for me because what you just described to me actually seemed more like a monolith where I've got all this connectivity into a single source that needs to understand and work together. But it sounds like you guys are more microservices. So these are, you know how to reconcile those two ideas?

Benny Tadele: In my head that, that's very good. All the systems that I just described, think of them as systems that are independent, that can integrate through an API and you can set instructions and then also accept set data points. For now just think about your transaction. Processing is one service, but within it it will have other microservices. But think of it as one service. Your menu is as one service, your inventory as one service. So if you have an agent, so these agents have to coordinate and work together. They have to understand your context. So you do have, you need to have a centralized data. But if an agent is integrated to your order service to look at what is actually being ordered so that I can intercept and understand or through the camera vision understand. Now it can send instruction to your menu to say here's what you need to update based on your inventory or receive data from inventory. So in fact it's the other way around. Unless you have a microservices, you can't have agent interactions with multiple components of the system to affect an ultimate outcome.

Matt Wampler: Okay, so I'll accept that that was a good explanation of it. How do you think about the computer vision as an example? Does that mean that NCR is going to get into the hardware computer vision business? Or do you think of this as hey, we're still going to be, you know, plug and connect best in breed, you know, and work with those?

Benny Tadele: Yeah. No, no. So our intent is look, I don't know, we actually have a product offer on the retail side that calls Pick Pick List Assist. You if you do your own grocery shopping, you might actually have seen it in one of the largest groceries in the United States. It's essentially sitting in your self checkout to look at camera instead of you fidgeting on the screen to look at, you know, did you get the organic apple or the green apple you have a camera looking at and then giving you a limited list to pick from. So Pick List Assist is a product we have. So we are sort of in the, in the computer vision industry. But the intent of what I just told you is not for us to get into computer vision to talk about food quality and order accuracy and all that. This is to show you the openness of the platform, the Voyix Commerce Platform and the integration that you can do to participate in the transaction life cycle and in the customer experience and in the operator experience. Is pretty simple. So as new technologies emerge and as you as an operator adopt new technologies, you can innovate a lot faster on our platform. That's the message.

Matt Wampler: That makes total sense. And you were bringing up the APIs, and I actually like the way you thought about it. Is those microservices, you know, almost having their own facilitation. I think I saw something come out from your team saying that, you know, your menu is becoming an API. Walk me through that and how you're thinking about it.

Benny Tadele: Yeah, maybe three layers to menu. You have, I mean, in simplest terms, you have what you would call maybe a master data. Your, your master data model is you as a restaurant brand. What's your menu with the recipe with the, you know, inventory connection and all, and what's the main pricing component you have? What is all the hierarchy, management and so on? Our system will do that, but you also have really large brands that want to do that in their own system potentially. So that's one layer. The second layer is those menu items need to be delivered to different channels. Today in today's world, in Aloha and in the most point of legacy point of sale systems, you probably have one or two menus you need to manage in store, above store, and maybe you have partnered with a digital provider which has their own menu and then you got to work with their menu. And so I have a proliferation of menus. So our principle is the menu module and components has actually APIs bidirectional. So one is we can distribute now to all your different channels and in one place you can manage the menu distribution, different alteration rules, hierarchies, pricing, promotion, recipe, etc. And then by channel. So for every channel you have an API integration that takes that and whatever is available or targeted to that channel, be able to deliver that. So that's API A, API B. The other way to look at it is if you actually elect to manage that in your own repository, you can actually push that and we can help you orchestrate and facilitate the menu distribution so you don't have to worry about integrating through, I don't know, Uber Eats and Grubhub.

Matt Wampler: And what could be the centralized place hub and spoke and push it out.

Benny Tadele: That's right. That's exactly right. So you have two flavors of what menu API is. One is we manage it. We actually have a control center and UI you can manage in one place, one SKU menu and then your master data and then help facilitate distribute that. Or we also give you an incoming API where you manage that and you tell us what to do and we orchestrate and we integrate and we facilitate the distribution.

Matt Wampler: Talk to me about the future of order taking. You know, just kind of hard turn from APIs. Yeah, I was sitting at a, it was a Gibson's in Chicago and it was, I was with a bunch of restaurant guys and we were ordering drinks and we're watching this bartender and you know, it was crazy but most of the time he was having to punch in orders and ring up credit cards and like it was not, you know, I told him I wanted a martini. It would seem to me like we're not far off from you know, him saying yeah, martini for table three and then continuing the conversation with me and making my drink. You know, what is the future of order taking look like you know, or what are you thinking about for five years from now?

Benny Tadele: I, you know, maybe there is a, there's a techie part of me that will talk about the, the technology and how easy it's going to be and, and so on. I'll talk about that. I actually enjoy this conversation. But the other side of me is there is the hospitality and the people aspect of restaurants.

Matt Wampler: Totally.

Benny Tadele: And how do you retain that? So I, I talked to a mid sized casual restaurant brand CEO and she, she was telling me a turning point for her to adopt a handheld and what it looked like. And then she actually say she learned about it in another restaurant sitting with friends and she's like, we're having a conversation and the server was asking us and taking our orders and first drinks. And while we're talking our drinks came and I'm like, was such a life changing moment for me. He didn't have to leave our table to get the drinks. You know, like, how did this happen? It's magic. Like no it's not. Magic is actually I was able to fire the order while talking to you. I think to me AI is not just for the sake of AI or even any technology. It is how do we improve and even increase the hospitality, the service, the human touch of restaurants without increasing cost. And in simplify that. So whatever we do, I think it's going to do more of a human interaction. Otherwise I can. I can stay at home and order and deliver.

Matt Wampler: Yeah. So, yeah, I think the what I've kind of arrived because, you know, you always have to have a good, memorable way of saying things. AI is great at the administrative AI for admin and, you know, human side for hospitality. Right. Like. And that's how you deploy your people. Now I think the question is there's a, you know, when I think of a pos, I think of a screen. A screen is me looking at the screen, not at the person, Right?

Benny Tadele: That's right.

Matt Wampler: Screens everywhere. We're trying to get our people to look at screens less. So walk me through again. What. How do we get humans spending more time with the human side of the business doing the hospitality things and less on the administrative side? What does the future of that look like?

Benny Tadele: I mean, I mean, like you said, I think the best restaurant AI will often be invisible to you and me to the guest, but we will feel the result through better availability of the people, faster service, consistency of the order, just more present employees. So when you bring that to the actual order and what happens in the order process, I think you have a few things happening already without even talking about the future. The first one is you have brands like maybe Wingstop, who have actually declared almost 100% digital transaction at some point. And they're almost there, they're getting there. So digital transactions and you owning not the POs, but you, the consumer, the diner, deciding how to order, where to order. So that's. I think one trend digital is going to take off. The second one is inside the restaurant. You have a few things that are happening. Yes, handhelds are great. That's one way that is being disrupted. Not the pos, but actual handhelds are important. But even in the handhelds, I think voice is going to become important. One way of mechanism. Like you said, there is nothing to prevent me. Now I'll think there is something preventing me, but there's nothing really preventing me. Just like you're telling me the device I'm holding, the wearable I have, whatever that is, takes your order, transcribes it into our menu and actually put it into the system without me having to touch things. Now, restaurants are noisy. When you order, diners actually get all over the place and then you get interrupted by the child you brought or by the significant other that's with you who disagrees. So there's social cues and so on that you have to take. I don't think we're there yet. Because of that, I think we have a few providers that are out there, but I mean, the system is not there. But conversational, true, conversational through voice ordering is one item. At the bot example he gave. There is no reason, because you're telling the bartender what you want, there is no reason for the system actually to take that and inject it versus him going have to punch in exactly what he wants, right? So that's one way that I think it's going to change.

Matt Wampler: So when you go through those changes, I'm curious how much of it is, you know, you at NCR saying, we think this is where the market's going, right. And building in that direction versus, you know, restaurant operators and brands coming to you saying, these are the things we need. Restaurants are kind of difficult in some ways because, you know, they're not technical tuck companies, you know, their hospitality. And you know, not all restaurants really think about technology in the, in the right way. So how much of what you guys do is led by the customers versus you guys kind of having a vision of where the technology is going?

Benny Tadele: It is a, it's a push and pull. But I wouldn't say one is the answer because I'll tell you on the one side, you're absolutely right. Most restaurants tend to be conservative, tend to be, you know, resistant to change. Even if you look, if you can compare the retail world and the restaurant world in the technology adoption cycle, restaurants have been, I don't think it's anymore, but have been typically laggards or if you look at a configuration of a typical restaurant and you go a similarly sized retailer, there's a lot more investment in technology in retail. I mean, I would say that's the average. That's not always the case, but on average. But that's changing. But you also have, within the restaurant sector, actually restaurant brands that think very on the cutting edge, pushing the envelope, really thinking about customer experience and innovation and investment in technology. And what we've done, especially in the new paradigm of Aloha Next and the platform that we're bringing to market is partner with certain brands as what we call our lighthouse customers. And these lighthouse customers are at what I just described, best in breed in their vertical or in their segment of restaurants. Best in breed from an innovation perspective, they think outside of the box and we do solicit that feedback. We sit around the table and they push us. So I don't think us just bringing to the table works. We have actually inputs. That's one side of the coin. Sorry, go ahead.

Matt Wampler: Well, And I was gonna say, so those Lighthouse customers, what are they saying today? What is it that they want?

Benny Tadele: Look, there are, if I, if I summarize the outcome, it's an outcome driven discussion. There are two outcomes. Every brand, not just the Lighthouse, every brand's driving. One is customer experience. How do I make it easy, you know, easy, easy, easy to interact. So friction, remove that friction from my customer interaction. So customer experience is one of the things. The second one is how do I make my bottom line bigger? Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, reduce food wastage. Some of the automation that I talked about, some of the vision AI stuff example that I give you actually came out of a customer conversation because they consistently found they were not ringing certain items in a make line that actually has a bottom line impact. So when they look at it, there is a percentage that I associate, so simple fix of if I were to be able to integrate to the point of sale so I can watch and tell the point of sale to say you did not ring this item because I'm relying on the cashier to visually pick, then I can improve my margin by this much. So I think efficiency and customer experience are the two things we're hearing.

Matt Wampler: If the POS went for from being able to, let's call it put an order into the system, the business then kind of transferred to almost a payments, kind of like facilitating transactions. And those digital payments, do you see that continuing to be kind of what the economics of the POS business is or is that going to change in the next five or 10 years?

Benny Tadele: I think the POS world is changing already and I don't know if your question is emanating from that, but it's already changing to be intrinsically combined, attached to the payments world because it's a payment facilitation. And I think it happened because of two reasons. One is from an experience to the operator, to the restaurant brands. From an experience perspective, usually what happened in the past is there's something, some issue with the order entry and order processing and then you end up having to manage two or three different parties. So where is the issue? Is it my payments provider, my gateway payment provider, my positive, you know, what is it? So that's one, I think now when you have one, it's very easy. You can create, you can address both things. So one is the experience. So you can address the experience of the customer and you don't have finger pointing happening in that creation of the experience. But the second one is the economics and the financials also significantly improve and change so you do also address the bottom line question. So I think you're right. The POS is going to move, I do think, into becoming very closely associated with payment processing.

Matt Wampler: See, I wonder if it won't shift over to workflows because I think of cause and effect and the cause usually starts with somebody ordered or a catering order came through. Right. And then that affects everything downstream. Like you guys are the gatekeeper, you guys generate the data that then elicits a response. You know, I would, I would almost think that as we become more agentic and you know, your data matters more and the workflows that you know result from it are going to matter more how you look at that.

Benny Tadele: Yeah, I think that this is also, I think you go back to what we said earlier. What should restaurant brands that are making a choice of a point of sale, how do they evaluate? And we say they should actually not select a new point of sale. They should select a platform. What's my building block? What's my platform for the future? And I think it's exactly because of what you just said. The future is not how do I process an order like that. Order processing engine is what I was saying. Yes, it's going to be closely associated with payments because you have the end to end experience. But your platform, which is the most important thing, is the entryway for everything and what happens. And ultimately, I mean, look, you can say workflow for almost everything, but in this instance especially, it is particularly important because now you have multiple channels. You can start from point of sale. Yes, but you have kiosk, you have mobile, you have first party ordering, you have aggregator, you're going to have agentic ordering in the future, you have catering. Yes, you have all of these things and all of these are going to produce data. Now you have the management side of it, right? You have inventory, you have labor, you have menu, you have forecasting, you have kitchen and then kitchen performance management. And now you got to decide all these things. Do they go direct to kitchen or not? And then you have all this data being produced from that. So ultimately it is because of what you say. The platform is a lot more important than just talking about the POS terminal. The most important thing is, is my platform to do is able to do what you just said.

Matt Wampler: An organization like yours has to think years in advance, how do you think about the future of the payment, whether it be Bitcoin or agentic commerce? Where are we looking to be in two to five years? Is it going to materially change or is it still the Credit card world that we live on today.

Benny Tadele: I have been, I have been talking about this for maybe 15, 15 years because I also come, like I told you, from the pain.

Matt Wampler: Tell me you're going to say Bitcoin and you bought it all 15 years ago.

Benny Tadele: I don't know which side you are. I don't know actually in two to five years if, if Bitcoin is going to become mainstream.

Matt Wampler: Well, I think about it less, less about what it is, whether it's bitcoin being mainstreamed or blockchain payments. But just in general, does anything change with the way we do transactions today in credit card, you know, like what does that future look like?

Benny Tadele: I think that I am less skeptical on a major change in the U.S. you know what I've seen over the past 15, 20 years is I think as a society, as a community, as a population in the US especially when it comes to payments, we're a lot more resistant. People are used to paying by their cards. Even when Apple Pay came out digital paying wallets like if you go 10 years, it was very hard to get adoption. Covid happened. Boom. I think Covid forced that life altering experience. Now you have digital transactions taking off. But all over the world though you go to other parts of the world, I think wallets will continue to rise. Account to account payments will continue to rise especially in Europe and in some Latin American countries that has been almost mainstream. But the larger part of our population in the US I think card and digital wallets will remain probably the main source of, you know, payments for the next at least five years. Five years. I don't think anything.

Matt Wampler: It just feels like it's got to evolve. I mean you've got what credit card rates of like 30%. You know, if you're have a late payment for the restaurants, I'm getting hit with 2, 3, 4, 5% lost in the transaction. For a low margin business where we're living in single digit profitability, that's the difference between making payroll or giving the team a raise.

Benny Tadele: I agree. What I do think will change is I expect there will be some policy change because that's the other part that hasn't changed for a long time in the US is on the rights of credit card processing, interchange rates change and so on, which a lot more regulated in other parts of the world, not here because it has been hiking up, you're right. And processors can increase fees and prices almost multiple times a year. So there are things policy wise that might change to curb that. But from a consumer experience and Habit, just the habit of using credit cards, using digital wallets. What I've seen, at least if history is anything we can learn from it is an inertia. It's very hard to change in where we are.

Matt Wampler: All right, I got one last question for you and we'll wrap this up. But agentic commerce, we all kind of understand the idea of I'm probably going to ask my AI assistant at some point to buy something for me and it's going to, but I don't know the mechanics behind that. Is that a complicated problem to solve?

Benny Tadele: I think it's already solved. I mean agentic AI already exists. Now when you layer agentic commerce, you have to do a few more things than just having an agent. You have to have the security means, you have to have the interaction already defined. For example, Google, as you know, has come out with a UCP protocol for agents to be able to order directly from shoppers or from restaurants. So different order, different. I mean a different API, different rail. So there are a few things to be done. But fundamentally what is agentic AI for the people listening to us? To me, I see the progression of AI probably, or technology in general in four steps. You start with the record phase. Traditional systems just recorded what happened. And then we went to understanding insight, right, which is, it's the, you know, what is happening. Can I understand across the restaurant, maybe even understand an opportunity or a problem, be able to describe it. So to me that was more the inside age. And I think most restaurants are probably in the recommend stage, which is I can ask a question and then I can get a recommendation. So recommend an action, do this, do that, reduce this, activate that. But when you go to the execute, that's the fourth stage. That's, that's essentially agentic, you know, agentic AI and then ultimately agentic commerce where you permitted either the user or the restaurant operator, the AI can actually go do the task, whether it's changing the menu. We talked about updating labor schedule or on the consumer side ordered me food.

Matt Wampler: So I guess put a finer point on it. I mean, I would think that, man, if I started allowing agents to order at a restaurant, you know, anybody's agent could just start doing something, you know, some 13 year old tells it to, you know, order me a sandwich every five seconds and all of a sudden it just starts spitting out orders because the agent never gets tired. You know, whether it be that or somebody wants to hack a store and just have a bunch of agents ordering and confusing the system, you know, I have to Imagine from your guys standpoint, it all sounds really good restaurants but you know there's some, there's a lot of thoughtful work that goes into actually making the mechanics work.

Benny Tadele: Yeah, it sounds like you've thought a lot about this which is, you know, as you just described it is not. That's why I say just because we have agentic AI doesn't mean that we are all as an industry ready for agentic commerce. There's that there is a lot that goes on top of one is security. I actually few months ago openclaw came out. I don't know if you've dabbled with openclaw and I actually set it up, I took a weekend set it up and it was interesting that it was a lot harder than I thought to actually put an order. And you know why? It was because most of the systems, I won't talk about the systems but all of the big aggregators and so on, the systems are not ready to allow or to interact with AI agents because they are considered bots and we have anti bot system. So we haven't as an industry yet figured out how do we ensure these are authorized bots. There's a security layer for it even within organizations. We talk about proliferating agents. We have a way to manage people. I give you a badge, I give you access to, I have audit logs for you. But do we have a similar system transposed onto agents? Because they are essentially you now. So I have to be able to manage them the same day, audit them, badge them, give them access, etc. So there is, I think a lot work around security permissions and so on. And then when it comes to I think the API work as well, there's more work to do in infrastructure side.

Matt Wampler: Hey, all I can think is, you know, my first restaurant was on a college campus and we would get bar rush drunks and they would always order like Fry. I mean we had a guy literally was blacklisted. We wouldn't deliver to him because he would always order, pass out and not pick up the sandwich or you order it and deliver it, they forget about it. And then they, you know, dispute the charge the next day and say I never ate it. Jimmy John's. And like I. All I could think is man, if you give that person an AI who knows what they're. And I haven't thought about this. I literally am making up ideas as we go. It's like I'm sure there'll be somebody that's got some time into it.

Benny Tadele: I agree there is a lot that goes into it before. Before we actually say at scale this is going to happen and then take off. There is the consumer behavior side as well. I think people are definitely going to be open because already people don't Google actually chat. Right. Whether it's chat GPT or Claude or whatnot. I can see where hey, based on my experience in order me this or previous experience but I don't know for that scale already yet.

Matt Wampler: Yeah. Well tell all the folks about Aloha Next when it's available, what they should expect, how they get in touch with you guys. Give us the rundown.

Benny Tadele: Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. So Aloha Next is not the next version of Aloha. It's not an evolution of Aloha. It's actually from the grounds up build of our next generation point of sale completely in microservices.

Matt Wampler: You got to work with marketing on that. Because if Aloha Next is not the next version of Aloha. That's a confusing term.

Benny Tadele: I love it. Yeah. It's not just a next version. Right. It is the next generation. So that's where the next is. It's not the next version but it's the next generation. Completely rebuilt microservices. All the things we talked about. And the other thing is it's a cloud to edge architecture. So it's an offline first. Your store resilient, always run. Even when the cloud is out. Even when the Internet is out. And it's officially launched in May of this year.

Matt Wampler: Congratulations.

Benny Tadele: Or near your store in NCR rep. So come see us. We'll be at FSTECH as well. Yeah. Excited to support restaurant brands.

Matt Wampler: National cash register. Isn't that what the NCR is?

Benny Tadele: NCR is the national cash register. That's right.

Matt Wampler: 145 Years. You got five more until the big 150. I hope. I hope there's a big celebration coming.

Benny Tadele: There will be. And you invited Matt and I'll. I'll make sure that you're invited.

Matt Wampler: I love it. Well Benny, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate all you guys do and I cannot wait to see the next version of Aloha or the next generation of Aloha.

Benny Tadele: The next generation of Aloha. Thank you. I appreciate it.