Damola Adamolekun wants to position Red Lobster to become the most AI-forward company.
As AFROTECH™ previously reported, the Nigerian investment banker — who worked at Goldman Sachs and was the former CEO of P.F. Chang’s, where he led the company to $1 billion in revenue — has brought his expertise to Red Lobster. He’s led the national seafood chain restaurant as CEO since 2024, coming in after the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and faced challenges, including holding more than $1 billion in debt and less than $30 million in cash.
The company is in better standing since its filing, though several locations have continued to be shut down, including its oldest location at 2583 North Monroe St. in Tallahassee, per USA Today. Its Times Square location, which opened more than two decades ago, also closed, according to For 5 New York. Adamolekun mentioned that there would need to be fewer locations to recover from the filing, The Wall Street Journal reported in February.
Adamolekun’s next task is to equip his team, improve operations, and embrace AI.
“AI is important. I know a lot of people are scared of it or don’t want to deal with it, but you have to. It’s changing the game in a tremendous way … I’m trying to be the most AI-forward restaurant company that exists,” he said on “The Black Money Tree Podcast,” hosted by Jerome D. Love.
Adamolekun acknowledged it’s difficult to have an enterprise-wide AI rollout, but is having conversations with different departments to brainstorm the best ways to leverage AI. For Human Resources, the technology could help employees evaluate people, make calculations, and create presentations or training materials, he noted. He also shared some ideas presented by the company’s chief operating officer (COO), Larry Konecny.
“My COO was like, ‘What if when I went to a restaurant, I could have AI pull all the relevant metrics of that restaurant, laid it out for me in a deck, and when I walk in, I’ve got everything I need right there versus having my team do it,'” he recalled on the podcast. “There’s a lot of everybody’s got ideas if you give them the empowerment to come up with them. So, I’m letting each department come up with their own ideas, and I’m just encouraging it and letting them do it.”
Adamolekun also stated that Red Lobster will roll out AI tools to assist with sales forecasting and streamline tasks such as determining how much food to order and writing schedules, which his team at headquarters has been doing manually.
“AI is intelligent enough to do that for us and learn from the past and learn going forward and be more accurate. So, we’ll roll that out and help people be better at their jobs. So, I’m finding opportunities to do it from a company level that I’m letting the team find opportunities to make themselves better … I do think we’ll be probably the best AI company, because I don’t know that anybody’s pushing it as hard as I am,” he said on the podcast.
