Jack in the Box CTO Doug Cook and WWT Chief Digital Advisor Charlie Lawhorn detail how a multi-year modernization sprint paved the way for advancements in artificial intelligence — and what every business can learn from the fast-food chain's journey. Doug and Charlie offer a candid conversation that delivers a playbook for prioritizing AI use cases, funding innovation in capital-constrained environments and rolling out AI with minimal disruption.

For more about this week's guests:

Doug Cook joined Jack in the Box as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer in October of 2021. Cook brings more than 20 years of industry experience leading guest and employee-facing platforms to Jack in the Box. Cook most recently served as interim CTO of Jack in the Box, effectively leading the technology team and strategy during his interim period. Prior to joining Jack in the Box, Cook served as Chief Information Officer at Pizza Hut. Before Pizza Hut, Cook spent two decades with Sonic applying leading-edge technologies and analytics to grow the company's innovation and market position.

Doug's top pick: Jack in the Box Case Study

Charlie Lawhorn is an experienced transformation leader with a career dedicated to designing and executing complex programs that help organizations navigate digital change. He specializes in aligning process design with modern digital technologies to enhance enterprise relevance and performance in a data-driven marketplace. Charlie leads teams that prioritize business outcomes, working closely with stakeholders to identify opportunities, apply the right processes and technologies and deliver measurable business value.

Charlie's top pick: Modernizing the Point of Sale at Jack in the Box to Drive Efficiency, Insights and Growth

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.