Chipotle Mexican Grill is deploying an artificial intelligence assistant that the company hopes will reduce the time it takes to hire employees by up to 75%.
The virtual recruiter, known as Ava Cado, will be available at the chain’s more than 3,500 restaurants in North America and Europe by the end of this month, the company announced Tuesday. Fall is Chipotle’s “second busiest hiring period of the year, behind the March-May sales sprint period.”burrito season”
The company says Ava collects applicant information, answers questions about the company, schedules meetings and sends offers to human-selected candidates. The goal is to remove these administrative tasks from managers’ to-do lists so they can focus on running their restaurants.
In a statement, Chipotle Chief Human Resources Officer Irene Esquenazi said the system “works as if we had hired additional administrative support for all of our restaurants.”
Powered by conversational AI from tech company Paradox, the AI assistant can speak in English, Spanish, French, and German. This is Chipotle’s latest move toward automation, following tests of robots that speed up the assembly of avocado mash and burrito bowls.
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