The AI now answers first — for customers and for would-be franchisees
Batteries Plus put agents on the store phone and the franchise sales line. Google's AI Mode now books hotel rooms. The first conversation with a brand is moving to software.
For most franchise businesses, the first real conversation with a customer used to happen at the counter or on the store phone, and the first conversation with a future franchisee happened with a development manager. Two announcements in the past three weeks show both of those moments moving to software — and raise questions most franchise agreements were never written to answer.
This is reference information, not legal or investment advice. Figures below are published by the companies or outlets named and compiled as-is; we have not independently verified them.
The store phone and the sales line
Batteries Plus announced three proprietary AI tools on 31 August (source: franchise.org, 2026). Edison answers calls to stores — which the brand says average about 30 a day per location — in English and Spanish, and is being deployed across 700+ stores, with completion targeted for the end of September. Wattson is product search tied to the point-of-sale system. Savannah is an SMS and voice agent that answers prospective franchisees' questions and books discovery calls.
Savannah is the one worth watching. It means an AI agent, not a person, now gives a would-be franchisee their first answers about the brand. That fits the wider pattern: the 2026 Annual Franchise Development Report put chatbot use at 54% of franchisors in the $101,000–$250,000 investment band, against 31% running lead scoring (source: Franchising.com, 2026).
When an agent answers a prospective franchisee, every answer it gives is a statement made by the brand. The disclosure rules do not become gentler because the speaker is software.
The booking that happens somewhere else
On the customer side, the shift is bigger. Google added hotel booking to AI Mode in Search for English-speaking US users, with ten launch partners: Choice Hotels, Hilton, Wyndham, IHG and Marriott, plus Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline and Trip.com (source: Hotel Dive, 2026). The partners act as merchant of record.
For a hotel franchisee, that sounds like more distribution. It also means the guest's first conversation happens on Google's surface, through the brand's integration, before the property is involved at all. Nothing published so far explains how those bookings are treated in the fees owners pay their brand, and we would not guess.
What the franchisee should ask
—Who owns the recordings, transcripts and customer data from an agent answering calls at my location?
—When the agent gets an answer wrong — a price, a stock level, an opening hour — who is responsible to the customer?
—Is a franchise development agent's script reviewed against the FDD, so it never makes a statement the disclosure document does not support?
—For bookings made through an AI agent, which channel are they counted as, and what fee does the property pay on them?
The useful reading of these announcements is not that AI replaces the counter or the development manager. It is that the first moment of trust is being handed to software — and the franchise agreement should say, in writing, who answers for what it says.