Chipotle COO calls hiring one of the ‘most painful processes’—so his AI bot ‘Ava Cado’ cut it from 12 days to 4

In high-turnover industries like fast casual food, recruiting workers can feel like a never-ending cycle of onboarding and offboarding. Even Chipotle—one of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in the country—isn’t immune. “We’re constantly trying to remove friction from our general manager or anything in the restaurant,” Chipotle Chief Operating Officer Jason Kidd said at Fortune’s COO Summit on Tuesday. But one challenge has stubbornly persisted: “One of the most painful processes we have still—and it’s getting much better—is the hiring process,” Kidd said. The company’s turnover rate had ballooned to almost 200% in 2021, and one answer, Chipotle decided in 2024, was an AI chatbot named “Ava Cado.” The innovation was designed to take the administrative weight of hiring off restaurant managers’ plates. The tool chats with job candidates, answers their questions about Chipotle, collects basic information, schedules interviews, and sends offer letters to candidates selected by hiring managers. The results have been measurable. The time from application to first day on the job has dropped from 12 days to four. And because “Ava Cado” operates around the clock, about 30% of that scheduling work now happens after hours—time that would have previously required a general manager to be on the clock. But Kidd framed the technology as augmentation, not replacement. Rather than cutting labor, Kidd said, Chipotle has redirected time savings back into restaurant operations. “Everything we’ve added from an AI standpoint—we’ve reinvested those hours into the restaurant,” he said. ‘How far can we push it?’ Still, Kidd said he sees limits to how far automation can go. “At the end of the day, that applicant ends up working for a human,” he added. “So how far can we push it?” Kidd wasn’t alone in arguing that, despite mounting pressure to automate, humans still need to remain at the center of the workplace. Alongside Kidd at the Fortune