3. Themes: The most harmful or menacing changes in digital life that are likely by 2035
How Jack In The Box Plans To Get To 20% Digital Sales With A New Hybrid Tech Stack
When Jack in the Box chief technology officer Doug Cook joined the company in summer 2021, the San Diego-based chain's technology investments were largely third-party "plug and play" partnerships. These days, Jack in the Box's tech capabilities have become much more customized and sophisticated, with first- and third-party digital sales now comprising 12% of the company's business. The hope, Cook said, is to get to 20% digital sales within the year.
To get there, Cook and his team are deploying a hybrid tech stack solution to both the flagship brand and Del Taco, comprising of an internally built digital platform and a new POS partnership with cloud-based POS system, Qu. From there, the plan will be to modernize Jack in the Box's tech stack, enable ease of omnichannel ordering, and unveil a new mobile app, which the in-house tech team is currently working on, alongside the digital technology platform.
"In so many ways, our technology plan is to own our tech capabilities moving forward," Cook told Nation's Restaurant News. "Prior to me joining the company, we were leveraging third parties and outsourced platforms, and now with our own internal capabilities and some trusted third-party engineering firms, we control our destiny. The plan to push into 20% digital sales is a really aggressive, but I think, achievable plan."
The debate between choosing a stack of the "best of" third-party tech vendors, aiming for a one-size-fits all approach with one or two primary tech partnerships, or building an in-house tech stack has intensified recently. While several years ago, the vast majority of restaurant companies did not have the resources or wherewithal to build their own custom tech platforms, now, that is changing. Wingstop, as one of the most prominent examples, discontinued its partnership with Olo this year to invest in a $50 million in-house proprietary technology platform. Other companies like Sweetgreen and Restaurant Brands International are choosing to go in-house with at least some aspects of their tech stack as well.
For Jack in the Box, a "Goldilocks" approach that marries in-house technology with select third-party partnerships like Qu, is the best approach.
"It's the right thing for other companies to build POS systems from scratch and own their own capability, but for us, that's not a differentiator and it's not a competitive advantage," Cook said. "That's where I draw the line—it's about, 'how can I partner with vendors and own the minimum, but where there's a competitive advantage, I can step it up on my own.' We don't need to be beholden to third parties, we want to control the experience, we want to personalize that experience….If I own this technology I can pave the future."
As Jack in the Box approaches it "Digital Transformation 2.0" era, the tasks and capabilities will be pretty evenly divided between the company's new POS system and an internal tech platform. Qu will be responsible for the "invisible" nuts and bolts of the digital tech stack, including "taking, making, paying for and delivering" food orders and providing self-ordering kiosks, as well as product optimization technology and tech integration. Jack in the Box's proprietary technology platform, meanwhile, will work on guest-facing technology, including a new mobile app and new website that's seamlessly integrated across all platforms.
"Like so many other quick-service restaurants, we're a technology company now, and it's hard for us to say that out loud at times, because we know we make burgers and tacos," Cook said. "But we're realizing that to gain market share and to gain the attention of the guest, you have to have these convenient, personalized experiences. And the only way to do that is to build [a team with] software talent. We're well on our way."
Contact Joanna at [email protected]m
UC Santa Cruz Expert Helps To Weigh Costs And Benefits Of Controversial Research On A High-risk Technology To Fight Climate Change
Environmental Studies Professor Sikina Jinnah recently wrapped up almost three years of work co-chairing Harvard University's SCoPEX Advisory Committee, one of the world's first efforts to design and implement a governance framework for an outdoor solar geoengineering experiment.
The panel's final report details a new governance framework that applies theory to practice in ways that could help researchers around the world to make more responsible and community-informed decisions about if and how any future experiments might proceed within this highly controversial realm of research. And since the SCoPEX experiment itself was recently canceled for a variety of reasons, the advisory committee's work may prove to be the project's most enduring legacy.
"This experiment was proposed in a governance desert," Jinnah said. "The framework that we've created now provides a concrete structure for how to evaluate this type of research in the future and facilitate quicker and more effective governance of any future experiments. Importantly, the framework includes societal engagement guidelines for how scientists should engage with communities with interests in their work."
Solar geoengineering is a technology that seeks to temporarily cool the planet and thereby offset some impacts of climate change, through methods like releasing particles into the stratosphere to reflect a small portion of sunlight away from the Earth. It's a relatively simple and potentially cost-effective technology that might be able to quickly lower global temperatures while the world aggressively ramps up reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Solar geoengineering could temporarily avert serious impacts from human-caused global warming, especially for the world's most vulnerable populations. But, it could also backfire spectacularly.
Solar geoengineering would discolor the sky and could disrupt rainfall patterns, but perhaps more importantly, many worry that it might distract from the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This would lead to continued harmful buildup of emissions that would increase the acidity of the ocean and, if solar geoengineering efforts were to suddenly stop or fail, could cause even faster catastrophic warming.
For these reasons and others, some argue that it's too risky to undertake any research related to solar geoengineering. Others argue that, based on the projected impacts from our current rate of unchecked global warming, it's too risky not to consider it. Harvard's Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEX) became the center of this debate in recent years, since it was one of the first proposed outdoor experiments to study the potential efficacy and risks of reflective stratospheric aerosol particles relevant to solar geoengineering.
The role of the SCoPEX Advisory Committee was to advise Harvard's Vice Provost for Research on if or under what conditions the experiment should proceed, based on the committee's independent assessment of the experiment's scientific quality and importance, risks associated with the proposed research, effectiveness of risk management, and stakeholder engagement considerations. Jinnah, who co-chaired the committee for nearly two years, was asked to join in 2021, for her expertise in global environmental governance and societal engagement.
"I would love to live in a world where we didn't have to consider technologies like solar geoengineering," Jinnah said. "But the people who have contributed least to the problem of climate change are going to suffer most and are already experiencing dramatic impacts, so unfortunately, I think we have a moral responsibility to consider it. And because of the conflict between that moral obligation and the potentially massive risks of this technology, there must be a governance framework wrapped around it in order to explore it in a responsible way."
Over the course of their work, the committee developed reports and recommendations on engineering and safety, finances, legal issues, scientific merit, and societal engagement related to the project and developed new processes for how to evaluate and deliberate on these issues. For Jinnah and some others on the committee, societal engagement in particular would have needed further development in order to recommend that the project could proceed.
The committee put together guidelines for how to produce and implement a societal engagement plan that were based our four core pillars: starting engagement efforts as early as possible, including social scientists with engagement expertise on research teams during the research design process, not presupposing what communities will be concerned about, and developing a plan that's responsive to community concern.
The panel's final report includes specific process recommendations for societal engagement, including what public information resources to develop, how to facilitate dialogue at the local and global level, where to bring in local partners and outside experts, and how to incorporate resulting community input into the decision-making process for project approvals.
"In the context of emerging tech development like this, societal engagement looks different at different stages of a project," Jinnah explained. "In the beginning, it's getting people familiar with the idea of your project and seeking initial feedback, then, as the science develops and you get closer to the possibility of an outdoor experiment, the nature of that engagement becomes more iterative and co-constitutive with communities who are impacted."
Jinnah and the committee hope that any researchers interested in future solar geoengineering experiments can learn lessons from the SCoPEX Advisory Committee's final report about how to conduct societal engagement in an effective and equitable manner. This guidance will be crucial, because interest in solar geoengineering is unlikely to go away, unless there are major changes in the pace at which nations around the world are reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"I've been working on climate change governance for more than two decades now and have been watching this very incremental pace of progress, with two steps forward, and one step back," Jinnah said. "There has been some really important progress at the subnational level, but in terms of moving climate response forward globally, unfortunately, we are not even close to making sufficient progress."
New Technology Key To Increasing Ag Productivity
Technological developments in agriculture have enabled continued output growth without requiring many additional inputs. Innovations in animal and crop genetics, chemicals, equipment, and farm organization have made it possible for total agricultural output to nearly triple between 1948 and 2021. During that period, a USDA report says the amount of inputs used in farming declined slightly over time, meaning that the growth in agricultural output over the long term has depended on increases in total factor productivity. TFP measures the amount of agricultural output produced from the combined inputs like labor, capital, and intermediate inputs employed in farm production. Therefore, growth in TPP indicates positive changes in the efficiency with which inputs are transformed into outputs. The USDA report says it can also be seen as an indicator of technical change. In the short term, total output growth and estimated TFP growth can be affected by random events like adverse weather.
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