Shake Shack is betting that AI earns its place in the back office before it earns headlines at the counter. Justin Mennen, the company’s chief information and technology officer since January 2025, is rolling out Project Catalyst<\/a> across a planned 1,500-location footprint, prioritizing decision acceleration and operational automation over the customer-facing AI plays most restaurant chains are chasing. The strategy leans heavily on enterprise AI vendors for scale and reliability, with selective in-house builds reserved for orchestration gaps the market hasn’t filled yet.<\/p>\n The buy-versus-build framing Mennen describes is where most enterprise IT leaders are quietly stuck right now. His answer, enterprise providers as the default and custom builds only when the capability simply doesn’t exist yet, is a reasonable posture, but it carries a real risk that rarely gets named. Enterprise AI vendors move slower than the orchestration layer that connects them, and if that layer is where Shake Shack is building, that’s also where their competitive differentiation either compounds or collapses.<\/p>\n The weekly AI roadmap review that Mennen runs with other senior leaders is worth noting because it’s structurally different from a quarterly steering committee. Keeping that cadence tight enough to track a moving market without turning it into a status meeting is harder than it sounds. The organizations that get this wrong don’t slow down their AI adoption, they accelerate the wrong things and then spend twelve months unwinding vendor commitments they made under pressure to show progress.<\/p>\n If your own AI governance sits at the quarterly review cadence, the Shake Shack model is a pressure test on your assumptions. The decision this reframes isn’t whether to buy or build, it’s whether your review cycle is actually fast enough to catch a bad vendor bet before it becomes a contract renewal you inherit.<\/p>\nWhat this means for your business<\/h2>\n