NEWS · AI IN FRANCHISING
The admin-first case for AI in franchising: automate the reporting, keep the coaching human
A 6 October 2026 opinion piece by a performance coach at home care franchise Right at Home argues franchisors should point AI at reporting, scheduling and workflow rather than at customer interaction, and should surface insights rather than decisions.
The argument
Franchising.com published a piece on 6 October 2026 by Joe Smithberg, a business performance coach at the home care franchise Right at Home, setting out where he thinks AI belongs in a franchise system.
His sequence is specific. Start with administration: reporting, scheduling, data analysis, workflow management, not customer interaction. Let the system surface trends and have experienced coaches interpret them and decide what to do. Say plainly where AI is deployed and where humans remain in the loop. Vet any tool for integration, security and compliance before a systemwide rollout. And check that the technology reinforces rather than erodes the brand’s stated values, recognising that a relationship-driven business has limits on what automation can carry.
The one concrete example is internal. Right at Home’s RightFocus dashboard consolidates operational data from several systems so franchisees can benchmark their own performance and spot trends themselves, instead of waiting for a coach to run a routine report.
Why this is worth more than it sounds
Admin-first is unglamorous advice, and it is also where the measurable return in franchising tends to sit. A field consultant covering thirty locations spends a large share of the week assembling numbers. Moving that work to software does not change what the consultant knows, it changes how many locations the same person can actually coach.
The second recommendation is the sharper one: surface insights, not decisions. In a franchise system the decision usually has a contract attached. A recommendation to change pricing, staffing or a supplier touches the franchise agreement, and an automated decision there creates an obligation nobody signed for. Keeping the model on the describing side of that line is a governance choice, not a timidity.
The limits of the piece
It is an opinion article. It publishes no survey, no adoption figures and no before-and-after numbers for the dashboard it describes, and the author writes from inside one brand in one sector. Treat it as a structured argument to test against your own system, not as evidence of what works across franchising.
Sources
Written with AI research assistance and published with the sources it was built from. Not investment, legal or financial advice.
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