The Future of Restaurant & Retail Tech: Rise Of The Chief Digital P&L Officer

Why Every Enterprise Restaurant & Retail Brand Needs a Growth-Focused Technology Leader

My Prediction

By 2027, a handful of the world’s most successful consumer brands will either replace or be on their way to replacing the traditional CIO/CDO/CTO split with a single threaded leader who owns digital revenue, data, AI, product, loyalty, consumer experience, and store-level tech.

The Chief Digital P&L Officer.

Why? Because to survive in this new reality, where consumer behavior is shifting faster than ever with rising expectations, macro uncertainty, and AI (whether it’s a bubble or not, it’s here to stay) – the ones who survive, and thrive, will be those who rethink their entire business model.

This role, or shift, might be called different things at different organizations. But the key takeaway here is this is a fundamental business model shift: from traditional operations to a true digital-first business.

In this newsletter, I’ll walk through why this transformation is inevitable, the signals that indicate it’s time to act, the benefits of doing it right, and how to get started, so you can put the right foundations in place without risking disruption.

Setting the Stage: The Questions Every CEO (and CIO, CTO, CDO) Is Asking Going Into 2026

As the industry heads into 2026, nearly every restaurant and retail executive is asking the same questions:

Growth: Where will our next wave of incremental revenue (SSS) come from, and how do we drive it while protecting store-level (franchisee) margins under increasing cost pressure?
Customer Experience: How do we deliver a consistent, elevated guest experience across every channel, store, mobile, delivery, loyalty, and kiosk, while aligning our HQ teams around the customer journey?
Efficiency: How should we restructure our organization – roles, leadership, and operating model – to stay fast and efficient as given changing consumer demands and AI?
Tech Stack: How do we modernize our fragmented tech stack so we can unlock unified data, deploy AI at scale, and eliminate tech debt caused by legacy systems?
Investments: What foundational investments must we make now to ensure long-term competitiveness while still maintaining strong financial performance today?

Put simply, it all comes down to one question that will determine who thrives and who falls behind over the next decade in restaurant and retail:

“How do I delight my guests with the best possible experience, drive franchise and store-level growth and profitability, and invest in the foundations for long-term digital and AI-driven growth, without breaking the business today?”

The answer starts with the leadership structure. And today’s structure isn’t built for what the industry needs next.

Why the Current Structure Fails

Here’s a scenario that I’ve seen multiple times. I’ve seen this pattern play out repeatedly at leading restaurant and retail brands:

A major chain has an e-commerce platform designed to support online orders, whether it’s “order ahead” for restaurants or “pay online, pick up in store” for retail. On paper, everything seems covered, but the structure breaks down under real-world pressures.

IT team: Builds the app, maintains infrastructure, and deploys new features. Requirements are gathered months in advance, features are developed without ever stepping into a store, and IT operates largely in isolation.
Marketing: Owns the products, upsell motions, and limited-time offers (LTOs) in the app. They don’t understand how the app is built and treat tech as a support function, sending lists of requests without collaborating on feasibility or strategy.
Loyalty: Owns rewards and customer engagement across all channels. Their focus is on driving frequency and retention, often with minimal alignment to marketing campaigns or tech capabilities.
Analytics: Collects and reports on data from the app, delivering insights to marketing, but rarely in a way that can influence rapid action, or answer “so what.”
Operations: Oversees stores and worries about disruptions caused by tech changes. Their priorities are uptime, store efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

Each leader is measured on their own KPIs: IT on app deployment and uptime, marketing on sales growth, loyalty on repeat visits or spend, analytics on reporting accuracy, and operations on store satisfaction scores.

No one is accountable for the overall customer experience, digital revenue, or speed of execution.

Now imagine this: your biggest competitor launches a nationwide initiative that directly threatens your core offering. To compete, you need a campaign of your own within two weeks.

Under the current structure:

Updating the app to support the campaign would take 2–3 months (I’ve seen longer).
Internal approvals for marketing campaigns slow things further.
Data needed to inform decisions is incomplete or delayed.
Getting ops to align and implement the changes in stores is a constant negotiation.

In other words, you miss the market window, lose customers, and fall behind to a more agile, tech-first competitor.

How a Single Digital P&L Owner Changes the Game

Now imagine a Chief Digital P&L Officer owns the app and web platforms, responsible for digital revenue, customer experience, and product outcomes, somewhat similar to a tech/software business:

Teams of engineers, product managers, and designers sit alongside marketing, loyalty, and operations extensions.
Decisions are guided by overarching business goals, customer needs, competitive landscape, and real-time data, not isolated KPIs.
Updates to the app or website can be deployed in days, not months, because the codebase is designed for iterative change, keeping in mind a long-term view of where the consumer is going.
Campaigns, loyalty offers, or operational changes are coordinated within the team, removing bottlenecks and aligning execution across all functions.
Real-time data informs every decision, from upsells and personalization to staffing and inventory planning.
The team is end-to-end accountable: revenue, engagement, and guest experience are tied to the digital P&L, not siloed functions.

Instead of competing with internal friction, your brand moves fast, aligned, and strategically, turning technology into a growth engine, rather than being viewed as a cost centre.

The existing fragmented CIO/CDO/CTO model is failing.

Back in 2020, I predicted this shift in my article on Dx3: “The New Era of Retail Marketing: Digital Channels, Social Marketing, and Hybrid Teams.” Brands would need to collapse silos, rethink digital as a core function, and build hybrid teams focused on speed and execution. Everything in that prediction has now accelerated, five years faster than expected.

Here is an updated take on why the current structure is no longer suitable or sustainable:

1. Brands and leaders are operating under an old business model. Digital is now core to revenue, yet companies still treat it as an add-on.

2. Technology is held together with band-aids. Patchwork systems, integrations on top of integrations, and data scattered across five platforms have compounded even further since the pandemic.

3. Tech is viewed as a cost center. Not a driver of revenue, growth, margin, or guest experience. As a result, it’s seen as support and one of the last functions to consult.

4. Teams are structured for yesterday’s world. Disconnected IT → digital → marketing → product → ops → stores. Zero alignment, with competing priorities, bureaucracy, and defensive decisions when you need to be on the offense.

5. They lack the agility to implement change. Months to ship a feature. Years to modernize a stack, with many brands repeating the cycle every 2-3 years. PMO-driven waterfall dressed up as “agile,” doing more harm than good.

A 24-month POS rollout across 1,000 stores used to be acceptable. Today, it’s unacceptable. Technology is evolving faster than most brands can deploy it.

6. Leadership is fragmented across too many owners. Everyone has “a piece” of digital, but no one owns the actual digital P&L.

What’s Changed (And Why Leaders Can’t Ignore It)

When I look the underlying signals as to what has really changed, there are three massive disruptions that have made the existing model obsolete:

1. Digital now drives a significant share of revenue

Digital now represents 30–70% of transactions for many brands, and these revenues are strongly linked to actions that boost transaction volume, frequency, check size, loyalty, and personalization.

2. AI requires unified data, unified platforms, and unified leadership

AI breaks the second the org chart is fragmented. It requires a 360 view of the customer, and that is greatly hindered by how the guest channels are owned, prioritized, and structured.

I also believe AI needs to be a store-level operational unlock with immediate impact. It should allow operators to (1) maximize the employee experience, (2) drive incremental volume, and (3) improve guest experience in real time.

But none of this works without a unified leader who owns data + AI + store tech + digital platforms + product + operations interfaces.

If brands want to remain relevant 10 years from now, this is a key obstacle that needs to be addressed fast, or you run the risk of shrinking margins, commoditized business, and high volatility to consumer shifts.

3. Consumer expectations have permanently shifted

The guest experience now spans channels, app, kiosk, delivery, loyalty, in-store interactions, requiring cross-team alignment the old structure can’t deliver. Expectations will continue to rise on how, when, and where your customers expect you to meet and delight them.

What the ‘Chief Digital P&L Officer’ Owns:

This new executive centralizes the critical levers to running a consumer business of the future:

Digital Revenue & P&L
Product & Engineering
Data & AI
Consumer Platforms (app, web, loyalty, ordering)
Martech & CRM
Digital Operations & Store Technology
Guest Experience across channels

The mandate becomes one of a bold transformation – to unify vision, accelerate execution, and shift the company from legacy systems to digital and AI-first foundations.

How CEOs Should Rethink Their Business Model

Before I walk through the fundamental shifts required in moving towards a digital first business, here is the Digital Growth Acceleration Model that I first introduced in 2022. It defines the key components that influence the level of digital growth for a business. Controlling and improving on each component allows a business to accelerate the rate of its growth. I.e. the rate at which your business and digital revenues are growing. You can dive into this further here.

Below are what I consider the four key changes that must be made to begin the journey towards a restaurant/retail business of the future.

1. Shift IT from cost center → growth engine

Technology must be tied to revenue and margin, not maintenance budgets.

2. Restructure teams around the customer journey

Start with where guests are going. Build teams that can delight them in every channel with speed and cohesion.

3. Replace projects with execution capability

The PMO era is over. A product-led organization delivers continuous value, not milestone checkboxes.

PMO = bottlenecks, waterfalls, and “agile theater.” Product = ownership, outcomes, and relentless execution.

4. Build a talent model for the next decade

Upskill where possible. Hire where required. And align all capability-building around digital, data, AI, and product.

Where Do You Start?

This shift is hard. Any type of transformation takes time. This is a business model and a people transformation. Each organization is different, at varying levels of digital modernization, agility and appetite for change. The key is to get started.

Here are a few steps that I would implement today to get the organization moving in the right direction.

1. Consolidate ownership of digital revenue

Give one leader full accountability. Build a P&L of all revenues that are generated through digital channels. This should also include 3rd party delivery or last-mile shipping, to ensure that the business margins or franchisee profitability are kept front and centre.

2. Collapse fragmented functions

Bring product, engineering, data/AI, store tech, and consumer-facing together. Build sub-teams centred around either key digital products such as order and pay, kiosk, or delivery, or aligned to customer channels, such as in-store, 3rd party, owned channels, etc. The goal here is not to get this perfect, but to break down the walls and silos.

3. Build a unified operating model

Start with an overarching goal for the business, cascaded down to the senior team. The digital leader should own key metrics such as digital P/L growth and EBITDA, various digital KPIs such as number of orders, check size, as well as shared KPIs with peers, such as a great guest experience at the store, loyalty metrics, and so forth.

These metrics should then be cascaded down further to teams that own each channel, including product, marketing, IT, operations, and deployment, which would drive integrated roadmaps and deliverables.

4. Realign Marketing – Tech – Ops as core Allies

Realign Marketing and Store Operations as core allies to the Chief Digital P&L Officer. Treat these functions as cross-functional peers to ensure that digital products, AI initiatives, and new customer experiences are effectively deployed to stores and employees, translating strategy into measurable results on the ground.

This could include dotted line roles into the Digital P&L org, working in pods with the customer-centric teams, bringing best practices on how to plan, implement, and support these initiatives across channels.

5. Build a phased 24-month modernization plan

Look at your current tech stack, starting with what outcomes you want to deliver or your business in terms of guest experience, franchisee profitability and growth, and longevity. List out all the things your current tech stack does not allow you to do, and work backwards to what it would take to get you to your future state. Bucket these into short-term projects, medium-term initiatives, and long-term foundational investments.

6. Realign incentives toward digital P&L outcomes

Tie tech compensation to revenue, not activity. For example, updating an app on time or launching LTOs on time are activities. Incremental sales, customer visits, and total spend are outcomes.

This will also ensure that you do what is best for your business in terms of tech investments – build or buy. When you measure a P&L, it becomes very easy to forecast the impact of a SaaS system on your profitability versus the impact of a team of engineers. Each has its place, and should be tied to the ultimate goal.

Ending Thoughts:

Every restaurant and retail CEO is facing the same crossroads. You can tweak your structure and continue operating with legacy outcomes, or you can rebuild your leadership model around digital, AI, and the guest experience.

The companies that win the next decade will be the ones that:

Delight their guests
Empower their employees
Protect and expand store profitability
Modernize their foundations
And adopt a Digital/AI-first business model

The Chief Digital P&L Officer is not a role – it’s a fundamental shift in the business model of enterprise restaurants and retail brands.

And the companies that embrace it first and go on the offence, will lead the next era of growth.