Agentic AI and scheduling take the main stage at FS/TEC 2026

What happened

Nation Restaurant News published its FS/TEC 2026 preview on 18 September 2026. The conference, held at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, Texas, expects more than 600 operators and more than 650 vendors, and marks its thirtieth year.

The programme is a useful map of where restaurant AI spending is actually going. Harri is presenting on AI scheduling that learns over time. Oracle and Momos are running agentic AI sessions. Revmo AI chief technology officer Bobby Beckmann is demonstrating real-time application building. PAR is offering technology predictions drawn from more than 500 restaurant clients. Wonder, the food hall, delivery and robotics hybrid, is presenting with North American chief executive Tony Hoggett and robotics head Michael Farid. Wing is running live drone delivery demonstrations, and back-of-house sessions feature Kitchen Armor, Crunchtime, BOHA and U-Experten. Speakers include author Stephen Witt, food influencer Keith Lee, 7 Brew Coffee chief technology officer Danyel Bischof-Forsyth and Smoothie King chief information officer Jyoti Lynch.

Why it matters for franchise systems

Note which use cases the market has prioritised. Not customer-facing novelty, but scheduling, back-of-house and order flow — the parts of the business where a franchisee feels cost every single day.

Scheduling is the clearest case. Labour is the largest controllable line in most food-service P&L statements, and it is managed by store managers under time pressure with imperfect forecasts. A scheduling system that learns store-specific patterns transfers a scarce skill into software. For a franchisor, that is one of the few technologies that improves franchisee profit without requiring the franchisee to be excellent.

The word to watch is agentic, meaning software that takes actions rather than only producing recommendations. In a franchised network that raises an unresolved governance question: when an agent reorders stock or adjusts a shift, who is accountable for the outcome, the brand that supplied the system or the independent business that ran it.

Figures to keep

• Event: FS/TEC 2026, Gaylord Texan Resort, Grapevine, Texas; thirtieth year
• Scale: 600+ operators, 650+ vendors expected
• PAR predictions drawn from 500+ restaurant clients
• Themes: agentic AI, self-learning scheduling, robotics, drone delivery, back-of-house systems

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