Most lists of AI use cases are lists of tasks: write the email, summarize the lease, answer the question.
A better place to look is where work sits still.
The mistake is starting with the tool instead of the delay.
In a multi-unit business, a lot of delay doesn’t happen while someone is working. It happens between people: a site package waiting for review, a permit waiting for a response, a field visit waiting for follow-up, a candidate waiting for a call. The work didn’t get harder. It got stuck at a handoff.
That is where AI is most likely to pay off, and it is also where it is easiest to waste money if you skip the basics.
The Time Is In The Gaps
McKinsey calls the cost of human handoffs between workflow steps the “coordination interface tax.” It reports that coordination (aligning, verifying, reconciling, waiting and handing work along) consumes 35 to 60 percent of total work time in knowledge-intensive organizations. McKinsey
Its worked example is a single planning workflow at a company it does not name. The actual work inside the steps took 12 to 24 hours. The waiting between steps took 9 to 18 days, which McKinsey says is nine to 36 times longer. McKinsey
Treat that as a pattern, not a benchmark. It comes from a consulting firm that sells workflow redesign, and the case is an industrial planning process, not a store opening. But the pattern will be familiar to any operator who has watched a ready project wait on one signature.
Store openings show it in our world. One industry source estimates 2 to 5 days per handoff and 15 to 20 stakeholders touching a typical opening (Consultevo), and a franchise software vendor claims coordination overhead alone adds 4 to 6 weeks (Franly). Those are vendor figures, so use them as prompts to measure your own, not as facts to quote.
Speed Up One Step And The Next One Shows
The software industry has the cleanest evidence of what happens when AI accelerates one step. A study of more than 100,000 developers found AI tools raised coding activity by a cumulative 180%, but software releases rose only 30%. The authors said the constraint appears to be shifting from writing code to reviewing, integrating and distributing it. Knowledge at Wharton
A lease summary produced in 30 seconds is the same kind of speed-up. If the committee that approves the site meets monthly, or no one owns the renewal date, the faster summary doesn’t make the project faster. It makes the next waiting point easier to see.
A Handoff Map For The Four Lanes
For each lane, find the handoff, then decide what AI can do and what has to stay human.
| Lane | Handoff where work waits | Where AI may help | What stays human |
|---|---|---|---|
| Field operations | Field visit to follow-up actions | Turn notes into a consistent action list; retrieve the approved procedure | Coaching, judgment calls, accountability for the fix |
| Development | Lease to pre-construction, design to permits, construction to operations | Track open items, flag missing documents, summarize status for each owner | A named owner and a clear “done” standard for each dependency |
| Real estate | Broker package to internal review; signed lease to critical-date calendar | Compare packages against your criteria; draft the first lease abstract | Approval decision; verification of dates and notice windows |
| Franchise infrastructure | Candidate question to next conversation | Answer routine questions from approved content; schedule calls | Anything involving earnings claims, disclosure or qualification judgment |
The development row follows the handoffs that commonly hold up an opening: lease to pre-construction, design to permits, procurement to construction, construction to operations, and project team to store team.
One Documented Example, And A Warning
Chipotle’s hiring tool is the clearest restaurant example of the pattern. Chipotle says its “Ava Cado” assistant cut the time from application to first day from 12 days to four. Fortune The tool answers candidates’ questions, collects basic information and schedules interviews. Chipotle’s chief human resources officer said the manager interview remains the opportunity to judge whether a person fits the company’s values. HCAmag
That is a clean split. The tool handles the waiting. The manager keeps the conversation. Chipotle’s operating chief also said the hours saved were reinvested in the restaurant. Fortune
Two cautions. These are company-reported results, and it is a hiring example for restaurant employees, not a franchise-candidate example. Use it as evidence of the pattern, not as a promise for your own candidate pipeline.
Contract review carries a different warning. One roundup of benchmarks reports that a model scored above 0.9 on easy clauses like governing law and parties but near zero on the notice period to terminate a renewal. The roundup also notes that dataset performance is not the same as live review, and that aggregate scores can conceal poor results on important clause types. Legal AI Insights Those tests used general commercial contracts, not retail leases, and tools change. Still, the clause that most affects a tenant’s next decision can be the one the tool is weakest at, which is exactly why a person must verify critical dates.
Where The Other Side Is Right
The strongest objection is that the biggest gains aren’t between steps at all. They are inside one step, at the front line.
Bojangles says its drive-thru voice system needs a person only 1 to 2% of the time and cut employees’ drive-thru workload by 35%. Franchising.com Those are company figures, but they describe a task done faster inside a step, not a handoff between teams. If you only look for gaps between steps, you could miss that kind of gain.
The objection also has a point about the source of the handoff argument. McKinsey’s framing comes from a firm that benefits when clients redesign workflows. The software evidence comes from developers, not store operators. The honest summary is that the pattern is plausible and well illustrated, not proven for multi-unit retail.
There’s also a human cost to removing handoffs. Some of them are where trust gets built: the call between a franchise candidate and a development leader, or the district manager’s visit. Automating that moment because it is slow may remove the thing the business was selling.
So there are two places to look: the repetitive task inside a step, and the wait between steps. Both can pay. The mistake is starting with the tool instead of the delay.
Measure The Wait First
Pick one handoff and track ten recent cases. Record when the work arrived, when someone started it, and when it was done. Compare the time someone spent working with the time the item sat waiting.
Before adding AI, check that the handoff has four basics: one named receiver, a shared definition of done, a timestamp and an acknowledgment. Quire
If the biggest wait is a missing owner, AI won’t fix it. If it is routine information gathering, summarizing or routing that a person has to check anyway, you have a reasonable first test.
Where AI shortens a wait and a person still checks the result, keep it. Where it produces a faster summary that nobody acts on, it is decoration.