“Opportunities like this in tech don’t come up that frequently,” Azzurri Group digital and technology director Jim Hingston says of US-themed restaurant chain Dave’s Hot Chicken.
“You look at the power of the brand, the demand for it, the opportunity we have – my challenge is how do I make tech really a catalyst for the growth and allow us to roll out stores in new markets and territories.”
Hingston chatted to Computer Weekly in the build-up to his appearance on a panel at Retail Technology Show 2026, where he intends to join a discussion on the changing face of digital and tech in hospitality.
Dave’s Hot Chicken, which Azzurri won the UK and Irelandmaster franchise rights for in 2024 and has franchise rights for in 10 other countries, has been a growth driver for Azzurri, which recorded flat revenue figures of £303.1m for the year to 30 June 2025.
Azzurri’s franchise agreement is to roll out a minimum of 180 Dave’s Hot Chicken restaurants across Europe, with around 14 expected to be in the UK and Ireland by the end of 2026.
Avoiding retail legacy tech entanglement
Hingston says the brand, which is essentially a startup in terms of its European status, gives his group’s tech team a chance to pull new growth levers and avoid getting in a legacy tech tangle often associated with more established businesses.
“It’s never totally greenfield, there are always a few shrubs and weeds you’ve got to get through, but it’s such a great opportunity,” Hingston says of the brand and its modern tech stack.
Work done with Dave’s could then provide a tech blueprint for its group stablemates such as ASK and Zizzi, which, like any restaurant chains, require continual upgrading and reinforcement from a tech and digital perspective. “If I have tech and I’ve proved I can scale it, [the question becomes about] applying it back into the rest of the group,” Hingston adds.
Whether the opportunity for modern tech development and transformational change ultimately sits with Azzurri remains to be seen, however, after Bloomberg reported on 12 March that the restaurant group was considering the sale of Dave’s.
Either way, the internal positivity about the brand and the seemingly external interest in it highlights the potential for the business as it continues to grow out from its Los Angeles roots.
“In Dave’s, we have a great opportunity of a new, successful, high-volume quick service business where you can use tech to give you a real advantage, where you can grow a business a lot quicker,” Hingston says.
How might that tech or digital capability present itself? First – and an area Azzurri is particularly excited about – is in dynamic pricing.
As reported, the group incubated and spun out Openr, a tech and data platform that enables speedier menu changes and price elasticity. That now-standalone tech business, which was the brainchild of Hingston’s former boss Joel Robinson, who continues to run the operation, is still used by Azzurri Group.
Travel and retail have done [price optimisation] for years, but you can’t do it if it takes you six weeks to update a price or you have set systems Jim Hingston, Dave’s Hot Chicken
Being able to change pricing per location, time of day or based on special events is seen as a key way tech can be a business driver. Think special offers at typically quieter times of the day to draw customers in, or more premium prices in line with demand – there are so many ways this technique can be business positive, Hingston says.
Legacy tech issues, he adds, mean it can take six months to conduct a menu change, or six weeks to update pricing in the hospitality space. “Retail peers look at me as if I’m on a different planet,” he says. “As an operator, we’re looking at pricing optimisation. Travel and retail have done it for years, but you can’t do price optimisation if it takes you six weeks to update a price or you have set systems.”
The ideal tech infrastructure Hingston and his team – which comprises around 25 roles and includes a relatively new in-house engineering team – are keen to implement, starting with Dave’s, is a headless digital architecture. They want to build a “tech ecosystem” around some of those principles of price optimisation.
Openr is being already being used by the group via partnerships with aggregator platforms Deliveroo, JustEat and UberEats.
Making physical stores an ‘event’ for digital natives
Elsewhere from a tech perspective, Hingston envisages opportunities for Dave’s to create interactive experiences for its restaurant customers via the digital screens deployed at venues.
The screens it has installed in its flagship London Shaftsbury Avenue site replicate the nearby Piccadilly Circus billboards. The tech boss, who joined from Gym Group in 2024, describes the need to bring excitement to life in store “so it feels like an event”.
This is an area of particular focus for Dave’s, which has a core influencer-led, digital native and social media-loving Gen Z audience. In terms of capturing their hearts and minds, one mooted idea is to use the digital billboards in restaurants – already in place to facilitate the Openr-enabled dynamic pricing – to gamify the customer experience (CX). Trison, which provides the screens, can enable loyalty app-linkups that permit users to control some of the content on display.
“That’s expensive tech but we’re seeing the cost come down and there are so many fun things you can do with an in-store experience when you have a digitally native audience,” Hingston says.
Around 10-15% of in-restaurant interactions at Azzurri Group are conducted via the order-and-pay system facilitated on smartphones, but generally speaking Hingston believes the best tech in hospitality and the wider retail landscape is hidden. The tech that powers operations rather than any shiny hardware and software that can bring friction to the CX is most crucial, he acknowledges.
For example, Wi-Fi usage in Dave’s is considerably higher than that encountered in the more family-oriented and traditional ASK branches, according to the digital boss. That shows the importance of network infrastructure in modern hospitality.
AI a useful tool, but cannot replace creativity
On the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution sweeping across retail and consumer-facing industries, Hingston is keen for his peers and the leadership team to experiment to see what business benefits may arise from it.
“I’m in the background making it safe – you must make sure you have good guardrails in place and know the limitations,” he says.
I think about the craft of software development; there is part of it which is artistry and deeply creative, and AI isn’t going to be able replace that Jim Hingston, Dave’s Hot Chicken
Hingston is cautious about overuse and over reliance on AI, though: “I think about the craft of software development; there is part of it which is artistry and deeply creative, and AI isn’t going to be able replace that – we need to temper things a little bit. But what’s great now is that, because the cost to entry is often a lot lower, I’m innovating quicker.
“Tech has a reputation of burning through cash, late deliveries and projects that are never ending – now you can break things down more easily. My team remind me we’re probably doing treble the amount we were as tech department.”
At Azzurri Group, there are six major tech programmes under way, Hingston says – “some deeply transformational”, adding: “Normally you do one or two of those a year. The team’s not much bigger and we’re spending less.”
It appears there are opportunities galore at Azzurri, and in particular at Dave’s Hot Chicken. Whether it remains a part of the group or not in the months to come remains to be seen – clearly, there’s plenty for the hospitality tech panel at Retail Technology Show to discuss at London’s Excel on 22 April.
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An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.
In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.
A college student in Wuhan tells WIRED that she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. (She asked to be only identified with her last name, He, to protect her privacy.) The student says the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before it eventually parked in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Luckily, it was not a busy road, and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen display in the car asked the passengers to remain in the car with seatbelt on and wait for a company representative to come “in five minutes,” according to a photo He shared with WIRED.
He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative on the phone. “They kept saying it would be reported to their superior. But they didn’t explain what caused [the outage] or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come,” He says. But no one ever came, and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to just get out and go home by themselves (the doors weren’t locked).
On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu’s customer support. “I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the phone line wouldn’t go through, and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable. So then what exactly is the SOS for?” wrote one person in a post on RedNote alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door to open and get out of the car as traffic halted to a complete stop behind her robotaxi. “Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology,” she wrote.
Baidu didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was “likely caused by a system malfunction,” but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It’s unclear how many of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been impacted.
One dash cam recording posted to RedNote shows a car passing 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in the span of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robotaxis by braking or changing lanes at the last minute.
Others were apparently not as fortunate. In another RedNote post, a man claimed he crashed into one of the malfunctioning Baidu vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving over 40 mph on a highway when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid the stopped robotaxi. He couldn’t react fast enough and ended up running into the self-driving car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed away show that the car’s front-right fender was completely torn off, and other parts appeared to have sustained major damage.
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