LinkedIn·Friday, 14 August 2026·12d ago

A week ago, I sat down with the CEO of a very large pizza chain in Italy. He asked me a question I get a lot these days: what do you think…

Guy Van Neck

Founder at Khova.ai

A week ago, I sat down with the CEO of a very large pizza chain in Italy. He asked me a question I get a lot these days: what do you think AI is actually going to do for a business like his? We talked through plenty of examples. One that stuck with him was queue analysis, using AI not just to measure how long people are waiting, but to read their behaviour, their mood, what's actually happening in that queue. Genuinely interesting technology. But then I said something that visibly changed how he was thinking about it. All of that is just another data layer. Another dashboard, for the manager or for HQ, with more insight to capture and more conclusions to draw, and that is the part everyone skips past. It is easy to get excited about having more data, but it is much harder to ask what anyone is actually meant to do with it. We are heading into a genuine revolution in how retail and restaurant businesses use technology. More applications, more intelligence, more of exactly this kind of insight, arriving faster than most teams can absorb it, and none of that matters if the people on the floor cannot turn it into a decision before the next customer walks in. The real question was never whether we can capture more. It's whether your managers can keep up with what you already give them. That gap is exactly what we set out to close.