Where technology meets the human touch – Lessons from CPO Humera Kassem
Red Robin’s Chief People Officer on AI adoption, culture change, and why authenticity is the one thing technology can’t replace.
Humera Kassem has spent over 30 years in HR — and she’ll tell you it started with a bulletin board, a Coca-Cola internship, and the kind of early discovery that shapes an entire career. Today, as Chief People Officer at Red Robin, she’s helping define what it looks like when a restaurant organization truly embraces AI, not just in the restaurant, but across the entire people function.
A career built on curiosity
Kassem’s path to the CPO chair didn’t follow a script. While working at the internship office at USC — physically posting job listings on bulletin boards — she came across something called “human resources.” A Coca-Cola internship followed. Eight weeks turned into a part-time job; graduation turned it into a career.
Over three decades, she’s built HR foundations and led people functions across an unusually diverse range of organizations: Coca-Cola, Delta, GE, JCPenney, NationStar Mortgage, Good Smoke, Jamba Juice, a five-year HR consulting practice she ran herself, Dave & Buster’s, and now Red Robin. The last ten years have been firmly rooted in the restaurant industry — a world she says she genuinely loves.
“I got very lucky that I stumbled into something I loved and have been able to build so many different foundations and layers ever since.”
The real challenges facing casual dining
Kassem is candid about the pressures Red Robin and the broader casual dining sector are facing. Traffic is down across the category. Consumer spending is tightening. And for a brand with a heavy West Coast footprint, rising labor costs — at both the non-exempt and exempt levels — are a constant pressure on already thin margins.
Her answer isn’t to cut. It’s to get smarter. “Drive traffic and improve efficiency,” she says. “Do more with less.” The question is how — and that’s where technology enters the picture.
Technology as a time liberator
When Kassem talks about AI and automation at Red Robin, the frame is always the same: give people back time for the work that actually matters. One of her clearest examples is the recruiting process for hourly team members. What used to require a manager to manually sift through applications, screen candidates by phone, and negotiate calendars has been replaced by an automated text-based tool that handles the knockout questions and self-schedules interviews — dramatically improving show-up rates while reclaiming three to five hours of manager time each week.
“This isn’t about taking away jobs. It’s about where you refocus your time.”
The same logic applies inside the support center. When Kassem joined Red Robin, a three-person team was spending roughly 24 hours a month collectively just calculating turnover figures. That same work now takes 15 minutes. The hours freed up go toward analysis, conversation, and problem-solving — the kind of work people actually find meaningful.
They have also built a custom system that takes prior-week scheduling data and sales actuals and generates optimized schedules based on the forecast. An AI-powered chatbot now allows hourly team members to text questions about benefits, paycheck timing, and W-2s — cutting the flood of calls to restaurant managers and reducing the rework that comes from returned mail every tax season.
Converting skeptics – one recipe at a time
Not everyone arrives at AI adoption on their own. Kassem describes a skip-level conversation with a team member who had never once logged into the company’s enterprise AI platform. The reason? She didn’t have time.
Kassem’s response was to sit with her, identify a task that consumed six hours a month, and walk through how AI might cut that in half. Then she gave her an assignment that had nothing to do with work at all: go home, list the ingredients in your fridge, and ask ChatGPT to suggest a recipe your kids will enjoy.
“I want your life — not just your job, but your life — to be easier,” Kassem told her. The next day, the team member came back with a story about something she’d done entirely on her own. She was converted.
Kassem uses the same personal playbook herself. After months of indecision about a kitchen remodel, she started photographing tiles and countertops at stores and prompting AI to render them in her actual kitchen. Within a week, she had her contractor back out and the project underway. “It cost me money, it didn’t save me money,” she laughs — but it broke the paralysis that had stalled her for nearly a year.
“Once you get into it, you see — oh, this is endless. There are so many opportunities to think about how to use this differently.”
Keeping the human in hospitality
For Kassem, the technology conversation always circles back to the same place: connection. The restaurant industry is a people business, and no amount of automation changes that. As AI takes over the administrative layer, she’s intentional about protecting the moments of genuine human interaction — redirecting, rather than replacing, the manager’s role.
Her closing thought for leaders navigating this moment is simple: stay authentic. People don’t leave jobs, the old adage goes — they leave managers. What sits beneath that truth, in Kassem’s view, is a failure of authentic connection. Technology can give you back the time. What you do with it is still entirely up to you.
“Despite the technology, despite the AI — those are all necessary. But despite it all, we’ve got to continue to stay authentic.”
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