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.