AI and restaurant loyalty—why Le Pain Quotidien is creating digital customer clones

On the surface, Le Pain Quotidien’s new AI assistant, which embodies the knowledge and recipes of founder and creative director Alain Coumont, is a tool for franchisees to quickly execute menu development. But the bakery chain has more ambitious plans to use it to create digital twins of customers and query them for insights. Alain.AI will create personas from real customer data, including that which has been acquired from members of the brand’s loyalty program, the Tartine Club, as well as that of non-members collected via social outreach. While these datasets will be anonymized to protect user privacy, they can still be treated as digital copies of real people. For example, Le Pain Quotidien can train Alain.AI on current trends around food and beverages, and then direct the platform to question the personas based on those trends. “We can see what are the products that people really want worldwide,” said Annick Van Overstraeten, CEO of Le Pain Quotidien. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Alain.AI is the latest example of how marketers are using AI-generated customers to deliver real-world insights. The practice is beginning to take off in the agency world, too, with shops such as Pereira O’Dell leading de facto focus groups with clusters of data packaged in an artificial body. Creative leaders are also receiving the AI treatment, as Le Pain Quotidien has done for Alain Coumont. DDB Worldwide created a chatbot inspired by effectiveness expert Les Binet, and both Publicis Groupe and Monks designed replicas of their own bosses. Le Pain Quotidien plans to use the customer insights derived from its Alain bot to help initiate changes to recipes and localize menus. The brand has restaurants in 19 countries, with plans to expand into five more in the coming months. Recognizing that different regions call for different ingredients, and that customer preferences would also look different around the world, Le Pain Quotidien wanted a way to accommodate these variables all at the same time. More from Ad Age: Food and beverage marketing to know about Van Overstraeten expects the twinning effort to kick off in early 2025. Until then, Le Pain Quotidien will use Alain.AI as a textbook AI assistant, but geared specifically for its franchises. Alain.AI was developed with digital studio November Five. OpenAI’s GPT-4o model is the main underpinning of the platform, accessed via an application programming interface (API), said Stijn Symons, director of architecture at November Five. Franchisees will be able to query the bot about any of the brand’s 10,000 recipes, as well as develop new ones from scratch. Through its conversational interface, Alain.AI can also help establish seasonal menus, including detailing ingredients that need to be purchased and instructions for how to prepare them. The third phase of Le Pain Quotidien’s plans for Alain.AI consists of using the platform to drive membership for its Tartine Club loyalty program, Van Overstraeten said. These members will eventually be given access to Alain.AI, through which they can obtain the brand’s recipes and potentially participate in cooking classes. While Le Pain Quotidien already boasts a sizable pool of customer data thanks to its global presence, growing this collection is key to pulling off all three phases of its Alain.AI plan. “The more members we have, the richer the data will be and the better [the AI] will work,” said Van Overstraeten.

AI and restaurant loyalty—why Le Pain Quotidien is creating digital customer clones

Featured Stories