Everyone, thanks for joining us. I will start by reading, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Savneet, great to have you here. You just reported Q4 last week. Anything that would stand out that you'd like to talk about?
Yeah. I think, we had a really strong Q4. We ended the year, sort of annualized growth about 15%, which is an awesome accomplishment, given a little bit of a slow start we had. We pulled in, about I think $17 million of ARR, just in that quarter, which is a record for us. About $7 million EBITDA, you know, good profitability, really good growth. Maybe most importantly, you know, had our biggest bookings quarter, ever as well. It was a really, really strong quarter, that, lots of positives, margin expansion on, I think, every line. I think, you know, critical to the future is that the bookings are really important for the next couple of years here.
Really, really strong that way. Then we announced a win of Papa John's, which will be our, you know, I think our second-largest restaurant customer ever. You know, a lot of really, really exciting stuff there.
That's great. You know, you've had several AI launches throughout the last year. It seems that it's kind of emphasized throughout the platform at this point. Can you talk, A, just a bit about, you know, how AI is playing into the platform and, B, why PAR is foundationally a good place to be to implement AI solutions?
Yeah. Maybe I'll do the latter first and then kind of weave into, to the first part. AI, I think, you know, we were a company that, you know, 3 years ago or 2.5 years ago, were freaking out of, like, "Oh my gosh, this is the end of everything." You know, we've totally changed, and I think for objective reasons, in the sense that, you know, we service an end market that is not digitally native, and it is relatively an organization that depends on vendors to create their future. I think what we've observed is that they're really dependent upon us to become their vendor to deliver those AI solutions.
More importantly, one of the great challenges of being in the restaurant and retail category has been this huge vendor sprawl of having, in the last 5 years, adopted 12 new software products that you didn't have 5, 6 years ago, and then trying to manage all that. There isn't a CIO or CTO in that organization that wishes they had less. We think the category itself is really interesting to service from an AI perspective for all those reasons. You know, maybe the last one I'll sort of suggest is these are organizations that look big optically.
You know, we serve a couple big, you know, 1,000-unit plus restaurant chains, and their entire corporate headquarters is 10 people, and the IT team is, like, eight. You know, those aren't organizations that are gonna go out and go build a point-of-sale system or a loyalty system. You know, they're just not set up that way, nor are they willing to take the risk to do that. I think it's a good. Then you have sort of the in-person nature of restaurants. It's just a really good category to build. You have them trying to serve a digital-native customer base that's evolving very quickly. It's a really good market to sell into.
At the same time, a really tough market for you to build your own product in if you're coming from that side. As far as what we're doing, we kind of witnessed that early on and said, "Oh, wow, like, this is gonna be the biggest opportunity for us," because all of these customers are now under intense cost pressure, both from the labor side and the input side, i.e., the food. At the same time, they're really struggling with traffic the last 12 months, 15 months. The need for our solutions has really accelerated.
We launched our first product towards the end of Q3, called Coach AI, which at the time was ostensibly ChatGPT for your data in the back office, but it's sort of turned now into prescriptive recommendations to run your restaurant better. You can go in there, and it'll point to you and say, "Hey, you gotta go focus on the store." "Hey, the labor schedule here is not working." Or, "Hey, you know," you can query it and ask for, "What's the most profitable promotion we've done in this part of the country?" Whatever it may be. What we observed was crazy, which for us, which is of the 13,000 stores we have on back office, 1,000 became customers within the first quarter.
You know, we are normally in a category that's a 6 months-12 months sales cycle. It was just mind-blowing to us. The second thing that was interesting was almost every single customer is an active daily user, meaning they use it multiple times a day, which again, is very unique in the category we service. Third is we made them pay for it, so we weren't sort of saying, "Here's this thing for free." All of those gave us a lot of encouragement that, you know, we can really service the need for our customers, and we're turning that product into what we call a self-driving product, which is now, instead of suggesting these recommendations, press this button to implement this recommendation. You know, run this promotion or order this food or whatever it may be.
That's kind of really encouraged us to kinda triple down and invest in that because I think we can. You know, I've always sort of seen the AI narrative for vertical software companies as very defensive. You know, it's, you know, "Oh, we have these great churn. We have very low churn, and so people love our products." I think, you know, going on offense is actually more important than defending the base that you have today. We're really aggressively investing, and we've got our second product we just announced today and kind of doing the same thing in the loyalty space. Long story short, I think that the end market is really ripe for AI. They're desperate for those cost advantages and revenue advantages.
Second, it's just not a category that's gonna build it themselves. I think the vendors that have trust are the ones that can deliver.
That's really exciting with the new products. I think what's even more exciting is you're able to commercialize them and charge for them. What gave you the confidence that, you know, you're in a customer base that obviously, I guess it speaks to the mission criticality of what you're doing, but can you talk through that decision to actually charge your customers and not just give everything away for free, which is an approach some people take?
Yeah. I think if you were to talk to the product team at PAR, they would sort of say one of the most annoying things that I've always said to them is, you know, every product team comes and says, "We've got the best product. We have the best product. We have the best product." I've always said, "You have the best product if you're the highest priced and it doesn't hurt your volumes." I think, you know, culturally as a business, I think our product team's like, "Well, if we just give it for free, Savneet's gonna say, 'Well, how can you tell me it's the best product if no one's paying for it?'" We kinda have that culturally as like, hey, a product's valuable if someone actually wants to spend money on it.
It's kind of part of our DNA to go do that. It's a really high bar because, you know, everybody is putting a wrapper around their product and saying they're an AI product, but very few people are actually building a new product. We really early on were like, "Hey, everyone's gonna have a chat interface to their enterprise software product. That's a given. What can we do that is actually a new product that creates new value so we can actually charge for it?" I think that focus as opposed to not just trying to be the chat wrapper, but actually what's a net new thing, allowed us to feel comfortable to charge for it. I think that was a distinction.
We've experimented with, you know, price, you know, the SaaS pricing models. We've used tokens. We've looked at, you know, transactionals. We'll figure that part out. It is clear that the category is definitely willing to pay.
Yeah. That's, you know, it's been really evident just through your numbers. I'm curious, you know, these are relatively new products, not just for you, but for the entire ecosystem. Even starting with Coach AI, has your go-to-market fundamentally changed? You know, obviously you're playing in a segment, you know, of the enterprise. How are you articulating this in your typical go-to-market motion?
Our go-to-market has changed, not because of AI, but because we've kind of transitioned our customer base to be multi-product in nature. Maybe the most exciting data point, I skipped this, on your comment on Q4, was that, you know, the average customer bought two products from us last year, when historically it was one. That was a really wow experience for us, which is, hey, we're gonna mine this customer base. We're gonna put more, push more sales directly. That is a really great narrative for AI because AI is this beautiful connective tool across all of your products.
You know, illustratively, if you've got a scheduling software here, you've got a labor management software here, you've got a point-of-sale software here, you know, connecting those through AI is actually a lot easier and a lot simpler to the end user. I think that is actually really accelerating that sales motion to buy more from us, not less. It's actually changed us more than, you know, we've adapted around it.
Yeah. I mean, I can remember talking to you years ago, and you had a vision of building a real platform, and it seems like, you know, AI is only as good as its inputs, and if you have a true platform with multi-prongs and multiple products, you really get the benefit. I mean, have you seen that in practice?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we've seen it in a few ways. You know, our largest point of sale win of all time was Burger King. You know, a year later, they added on our back office product, you know, sort of love the AI tooling that we have in there. That was sort of like, wow, we can displace these big back office companies with that. On the online ordering side, where we're a minnow in a big market, we're seeing that the integration between our Online Ordering and our Loyalty business is giving us that, oh my gosh, I can sell the customer something totally different than any competitor because you can sort of, you know, have one database, one tax system, one so on and so forth.
It's really, really powerful, and the ability to use AI to prove that is really, it's, like, very, very real now. I think that's what's given us a lot of confidence. You know, one of the other kind of exciting things I sort of am telling investors is, you know, we grew 15% last year. We guided that, you know, we don't intend to decelerate our growth year-over-year, which I think is a great thing in a market where everyone's decelerating, but it assumes none of these AI things work. For us, we're excited because I think they create a lot of upside to the company going forward.
Last question on AI. I think we've given it enough airtime, but what do you think what's next? Just, I mean, you can lump it together or separately for restaurants and convenience stores. How do you see them using this type of technology in the future, either through PAR or just generally?
I think what was the first level for every kind of physical business, so these are retail stores or restaurants or convenience stores or stuff that we sell to, is that I see all of them using it as a way to cut costs first. That's why the back office matters. How do I manage my inventory better, my supply chain better, my labor units? How do I get that data out? How do I lower costs? It's clearly the first thing that they're all jumping into. I think you have to prove that ROI quickly so that they can buy more and more versus something long-term in nature where all these will work. The second part we think is going to be on the customer engagement side.
How do I, instead of sending you a random coupon that, you know, you're a, you know, whatever, 35-year-old male with two kids in New York City, how do I then say, "Actually, I'm gonna send a segmented campaign that's tailored just to Emil?" Then how do I figure out how to use data that's not just the data that I have in your app from you, but the data that I can get publicly from everywhere else to put all together? So that ability to, like, hyper target is gonna be really interesting from a loyalty perspective and all that data. That cannot happen without AI today. You know, the AI, you sort of create a bunch of segments. With machine learning, you create a bunch of segments, and you target.
With AI, you can actually target each individual human being and make it feel like a customized experience. I think that will be second place. The third place, which is I think going to be the incredible unlock, is the self-driving restaurant. In a sense, what I mean by that is we have this product we're building where, you know, we really do expect that, you know, you're in a store and you get a flag that say, "Hot dogs are expiring in 10 days." Very quickly it says, "Do you wanna run a promotion to sell hot dogs?" You know, you press a button that says yes, it not only does it give you a campaign, it tells you, "Here's all the perfect segments." It says, "Here's all the people that never have chargebacks.
Here's the people that used to buy hot dogs, they haven't bought hot dogs. This is a good chance to bring them back in." It figures out what colors the campaign should look like. Should it be a push? Should it be an SMS? Should it be an email? Does all that insane amount of work and testing upfront. Then you can say, "Okay, run the campaign." Then when it runs the campaign, it says, "Hey, we're also provisioning an extra labor unit the day we run the campaign because there's gonna be a crowd in the store." Then, you know, creates this, you know, reflexive cycle, and then when the inventory comes down, it shuts the campaign off, and it totally releases the, that store.
Why that's so exciting to me is not just because it can do that full 360 view of, like, optimizing inventory and making the customer feel really happy, but also allows these gigantic organizations to optimize profitability on a per store basis. Today, you go run a campaign for whatever, you know, buy two, get one free, that campaign's across all of your stores. Versus I'm gonna optimize that unique store, each individual store on a hyper-targeted basis. That's really powerful, very unique, and no one's close to doing that yet. I think that's the journey of the way that the category will move, and I think that applies to all retail industries.
That's really interesting. I mean, we've certainly seen personalization come through, but to hear about it in the store level, it makes a lot of sense. It resonates. Let's talk a bit about customers. You know, we've talked about Burger King today. Obviously, that was a huge win. You've been able to see a lot of upsell through different products across your portfolio. Let's talk about Papa Johns. I mean, that's another, you know, landmark win for you guys. Can you talk a bit about the process to win that deal? You know, are you competing with folks and, you know, this is kind of an enter in, I guess, in a way, into a new segment for you.
It is, yeah. I think it's, you know, for the risk of being hyperbolic, like it's landmark for us in the sense that it is our second-biggest deal ever, I think, in restaurants, which is, you know, amazing. It's a multi-product deal, so it's point-of-sale and back office, which is great, kind of proving, again, proving the model in a very great and fair price point. What's really interesting is it's entered us into this pizza category, and pizza is really unique in the restaurant space in that for the point-of-sale market doesn't really service it today. You know, Papa Johns has built their own point-of-sale product. At Domino's, same thing. Most of the large pizza chains have built their own systems because the existing off-the-shelf products didn't service that category.
It wasn't really part of our TAM for the longest time. you know, downmarket, the same thing. The big point-of-sale companies that sell downmarket didn't really have a pizza offering. There's a specialized pizza POS. In upmarket, you built it on your own. Why it's exciting to us is we're able to kind of crack the code of a, of a really, really high-quality brand that's going through its own transformation, particularly on the digital side. Hopefully it's a beachhead for us to then go after the rest of the pizza market, which has not actually had an alternative in the past. We're not competing against competitors. We're competing against legacy products that they built at home. Clearly, you know, many of them want to change. I think that's really exciting for us.
The process was unique. It was a much faster process than normal. They were sort of in acute need. I think the other part was the CIO of Papa John's is a guy named Kevin Vasconi, who is sort of, you know, close to royalty in our category. He was at Domino's and Wendy's, so he's sort of the guy that had a lot of digital innovation, and so he really wanted to partner with a company that was as innovative as him. You know, he's literally on stage, I think, with the CEO of Google Cloud at their events as a big partner of GCP. He's pushing edge compute, like all this stuff way ahead of the rest of the category.
I think for him, it was really important that he had a vendor partner that was as aligned to that sort of digital innovation because he's, you know, such a legend in doing that. The coolest part about it was that we got it quickly, and then they're trusting us to build all the gaps we have to get pizza because clearly we haven't done it before in a very short period of time, and I think that's his bet on the execution of our company, which, you know, I would tell you 99 of 100 companies in our category, like, never hit their goals or dates, anything. It's just notorious. For us, he did enough references to sort of see that we would.
You know, it's probably a six-month process, and I think just been an incredible partnership.
I assume, you know, when you land a big deal like this, and you probably saw some of this in Burger King, I mean, is there some snowball effect where it helps you with others in that category? You know, obviously the just the reference of having, you know, these big brands helps you win other big brands, I assume. Is that how it works in practice?
It does. You know, I think we learned from Burger King. I, you know, I was never really sure of that, but I think, you know, after we won Burger King, it was clear how larger brands were like all of a sudden like, oh, wow, these, you know, these younger, newer companies can service the larger brands. I think winning Papa Johns is sort of reinforcing to that, but then also hopefully is reference for the other big pizza brands. I think so, and we certainly saw it after Burger King.
Switching gears a bit, to another brand that's near and dear to my heart, Shake Shack. You know, you and I have talked about loyalty and how important that product is specifically to the platform. Can you talk a little bit about the Shake Shack deal? You know, just tell us the high-level punch lines.
Yes. No pun intended, they purchased our product, or committed to purchase our product Punchh. You know, I think Shake Shack is, as you said, a very special brand that has a unique brand promise. The challenge of that is that brand promise, that, the way that you feel about Shake Shack, the way that I used to feel as an intern at, you know, CSFB waiting in line to get hot dogs for the trading floor, you know, like, that, it was an in-person experience. It was the quality of the food. It was a small brand. Then transitioning that experiential feeling you have to something digital is crazy hard. Like, it, and most of the times it does not work.
You know, you'll see brands that have been sort of focused on limited supply or steak restaurants all of a sudden have discounts on a loyalty app, and you're like, it totally kills who you are. I think for Shake Shack, that was probably the most important thing. Can they, can they make that digital presence feel like the same connectiveness you had in the store? I think they viewed our product as not only being really robust in terms of the ability to service every type of promotion, the tier structure they want or the point structure they want or whatever it may be, but also experiential in things like offering them games and passes and all sorts of different tools.
I think, you know, a core reason we won was that we had this breadth of functionality but also this big focus on creating the experience within their digital presence, as opposed to just saying it's a discounting app.
That's great. Sort of switching gears, but You just made an acquisition, of a company, Bridg. I'm curious, you know, how does it align to the broader platform? I do wanna talk about M&A more broadly in a bit, but can you tell us a little bit about this deal?
Yeah. It's a really exciting deal for us. Bridg we acquired for $27.5 million . It's about $14.5 million of revenue, so, you know, low multiple, high-quality business. Bridg, its core product is called IDR, Identity Resolution. Really what it's doing is helping retailers and restaurants identify their non-loyal customers, meaning non-loyal customers that aren't enrolled in loyalty programs. You can sort of see who your loyalty customers are, your non-loyalty customers, compare their behaviors. Then work to create campaigns to convert your customers that aren't loyalty program over to your loyalty program. You know, the business has, I think, gone through a lot of change.
In 2021, it was acquired for $350 million, and then subsequently, another $150 million went to an earn-out. It was a business that was acquired for half a billion dollars just four years ago. It was a really high-flying, really well-thought-out program built by a super smart team. The challenge was that it was within an amazing organization, but one that wasn't meant to service enterprise customers in the way that we do. It kind of withered on the vine there.
When you bring that under PAR, why it's so powerful is now we can go to our customers who are the, you know, largest loyalty footprint across restaurants and retail, and now say, "Hey, we've got your loyalty data in one place, and now we have every other customer in, essentially every other customer in your, in the same database, and now we have all the customer data in one place." For us, it was as much of an AI investment as it was traditional acquisition in the sense that now we are the AI tool to the customer. If you actually wanna have any question about your customer, we have it all in one place, and we can make it digestible and easy to work.
We're wicked excited, and it leads just from taking that IDR business to becoming a Customer Data Platform. It's defense and offense to us. It's solidifying the value of our loyalty program, but also now letting us go after these rest of the space. It's a really, really exciting deal, and I'd say it's one of those few opportunities where I think the pipeline and forecast we have will be underestimated post-deal because we just see so many ways we can cross-sell this into our customer base pretty quickly.
That's great. Kinda switching back to the customers, you know, Papa John's obviously a tier one deal. Do you see any other tier one deals in the pipeline, in the somewhat near future?
We've got three in pipeline, right now that are, you know, very large transactions. All three of them would be our, you know, would be I think larger than Papa John's. Really big opportunity for us. We are, you know, making tremendous progress. It's been crazy exciting. You know, we won Papa John's, all of a sudden, we had a larger chain come in to the RFP process. You know, pipeline is just has not really shrunk in a long time. I think that's representative of a couple things. One, the category itself is just becoming more and more digital. Like, it is just clear that there's more push and more investment by these brands to push into solutions like us.
I think the second part is the industry being very comfortable with us and saying, "Okay, like, PAR can actually handle all this companies of scale, this complexity. It can do pizza, so on and so forth." I think that's the other part that's there. Third, you know, we continue to really move the ball down the field on these three deals and feel really excited about the opportunity to win. It's like, and like I said in our guidance on the call, none of our guidance assumes we win anything and, you know, we still feel really good. You know, obviously, we're hopeful to win, you know, more than one of these over time.
That's great. You kinda touched on it earlier too, but just from a market perspective, I mean, are you seeing? You know, I assume a lot of the larger food service organizations have custom-built stuff, and they're just cobbling together different solutions, you know, out of, I won't say arrogance, but just out of, you know, we can probably do it best because we need something that's very tailored to us. Are you seeing that trend changing to where the larger food service organizations are saying, "Hey, maybe these tech," you know, I'm obviously not calling you a startup, but, like, tech-forward platforms.
Yeah. I think categorically, yes. There's certainly been a move over the last five, six years to stop building internal software and move to third party. Burger King is a really good example of that, but there are others. I think that's been a great thing. Now, I don't think any of those brands were, you know, acted with arrogance or hubris when they first made the decision to go build it because I think they were doing this, like, 15 years ago when there wasn't a good alternative. You could argue, if I build my own point of sale or loyalty, it's gonna be better than the off-the-shelf thing. The challenge with building software is you never stop building.
You're like, "Oh, I'm gonna go spend a bunch of money, build a product, and then I can just fire everybody, and I can use this product forever." Like, that's, as you know, not how it works. Then technology changes. You gotta build more, integrate more, have more partners. You know, the argument I've always given to when I have this argument with potential customers, the few that kinda hold on, I'm like, "Who's gonna hire better developers, a software company or a restaurant company? Who's gonna sorta see that?" Not to mention, because our product is in so many other brands, we see so much more stuff. We can see the innovation coming around the corner where you're just captive to what you have today, and you miss out on that.
Categorically, there's absolutely a move to third-party software. Now there are a couple brands, like literally it's a couple, less than one hand, that I think will continue to try to build. Yum! Brands have been very public about making massive investments in internal technology. I root for them, but I think it's gonna be really tough because, you know, one of the challenges of serving retail businesses is that you can go build great technology, then you gotta sell it to your own franchisees. There's friction there because they're like, "Well, are you ripping me off? What are you paying?" Like, there's, you know, there's a little bit of that. Then two, connecting this all together is just crazy hard.
I think in times of, you know, economic uncertainty, like, you know, you're if you're the CFO or CEO, like, why are we spending all this money building our own stuff when we can just have the franchisees pay, you know, a third-party vendor? I think you'll continue to see people build less and less over time, and that's really just because I think if you look back the last 15 years, I don't think those few brands that did it got great ROI from it.
Yeah. It's a good segue into competition. You know, we obviously see a lot of really new entrants in every category of software that are AI native and up and coming. How do you see your competition? Has it evolved? You know, where do you feel like your positioning is across the landscape?
From a competitive landscape perspective, it hasn't really changed that much on our core product of POS. We still have our three big competitors, NCR, Oracle, Global Payments, that own large portion of the market. One or two smaller companies that are always there, but it hasn't really evolved, and AI has not changed that at all. Yet. Now we'll watch it very carefully, but I think that's primarily because point of sale is a heavy mission-critical product. It's an enormous product. It is hard to replicate. You can vibe code an interface, but, like, it's so hard to build the decades of experience, like the trust, the integrations, the data.
I don't think there's gonna be a single brand of scale that's gonna trust such an important product to something that hasn't been, you know, really tested. I just think it's really hard. That's why I don't think startup are trying to go after that category in a big way. At least we haven't seen it, you know, that yet. That's incumbent upon us to become that, so that even if that thing exists, you're gonna pick the brand that you already trust. On the engagement side of our business, which is, you know, loyalty and online ordering, I think we'll see people try and enter that market.
For similar reasons, I think there'll be modules, not core disruptive products, because, you know, your loyalty engine, it's hard to envision you replacing that, particularly when it's $90 a month. You know, it's not like you're gonna save tons of money. You can imagine, sort of AI tools coming in and redoing the app, redoing the customer engagement experience with the actual touch of the customer. So, you know, those would be interesting acquisitions us for maybe down the road, but we haven't seen anyone kind of truly come in and say, "We're gonna replace it all." In the enterprise, you know, we haven't really seen much change. It's sort of been the same folks, and continues to be the same folks.
I think our big, you know, advantage versus the existing players is, you know, I always envision this sort of world of, you know, you go to an enterprise CIO, and every vendor's like, "Well, my agent's the best agent, and my agent's the best agent, and my agent's the best agent." There's gonna be this sort of friction, and you're gonna pick the agent that has the most data and the most products in your store because that's the one that's gonna be the source of truth, and that's kinda where we feel really lucky right now.
Yeah. I mean, I would say across tech, you know, being a platform is a real advantage. When it comes to M&A, I think you've been very tactical about how you've augmented the platform. You know, Bridg being a really great example. That was clearly an awesome opportunity and, you know, a lot of bang for your buck to say the least. How does M&A play into the future for you? Is that still gonna be a lever that you're gonna pull?
I think it's something we always have to maintain a look at, but I think, you know, today where our stock price is, like, it's probably gonna be a smaller lever to look at. I don't think we'll be doing anything aggressive until we feel like we're getting value for the business we've built. I think we have been pretty public about we kinda built the core building blocks we had, and so we weren't really looking for something big and transformative anyways. I think where M&A will be really valuable to us over time, provided, you know, we get our cost of capital down, is on the sort of tooling around our platform. You know, what's the stuff that we can fold in that can fit there? Can we continue to grow into new verticals?
you know, our expansion into convenience stores has been really successful. you know, we see a few other verticals we wanna get to in time. you know, whether we build or buy will be probably dependent upon, you know, the cost to do that. you know, I think we'll continue to do it. We feel like it's really worked well for us. It's certainly elevated the quality of the talent, certainly elevated the quality of the business. I think we've gotta pick our spots really carefully right now.
Great. Anybody have questions? We can pause for a minute and see if anyone wants to ask anything in the audience. All right. Talking about trends. You know, if I think about you having a platform strategy gives you a pretty great view into what's going on in restaurants. Have you noticed any particularly interesting customer trends or traffic trends or segments or, you know, different categories that you're seeing a lot more interest? I'm just curious 'cause you honestly have an amazing view over a lot of different aspects into the food industry.
Yeah. Yeah, I think there are a few macro trends and then some micro trends, meaning, you know, short-term. You know, one of the biggest macro trends we see is the convenience store market really encroaching upon the restaurant market. If you look at the convenience store category, it's been an incredible category. Or, you know, you look at the stocks of the public convenience stores, they've been some of the best performing stocks for the last decade, last 15 years. Their business is more and more challenged with things like EV charging, things like DoorDash and DashMart making it easier to buy the stuff that you'd go pay for at a convenience store. The way that the convenience store market has responded is really invested in their food offerings.
You know, I always, you know, sort of say this, but, you know, I suspect the biggest competitor of McDonald's is not Burger King, it's 7-Eleven. You know, do you pick up your breakfast sandwich there instead of going to your normal QSR? What we've seen is an incredible amount of investment from the convenience store category to now not only compete on breakfast, but to have prepared foods for lunch, for dinner, and really picking a path of being super cheap or being, like, really high quality food or... You can look at Casey's, which is, you know, now the fourth or fifth largest pizza chain in America, but it's a convenience store. You're really seeing just a big trend.
As a result, that category is now trying to become digital like restaurants. They're buying loyalty from companies like ourselves and realizing that to truly compete with restaurants, they've got to make very similar investments. I think that's a, that's a trend, and I think that trend continues, and I think it's a challenging one because, again, if we have EV charging and you're stuck charging your car for 10 minutes, like, you're probably gonna go buy your pizza or your dinner there. That will be an, a really big kinda shift and trend to watch. I think the other one, which is, you know, more, more recent, has been this, the value wars we've seen in restaurants have been extreme.
What's been unique about it is normally in a value-based economy, the QSR market has been the net winner because the food is easy to produce, it's cheaper, it's faster. They've got great delivery mechanisms through drive-thru and third-party delivery. In the last 12 months, 15 months, they've actually, I think, not won. The winners in that category have been the casual dining, full-service dining firms that were able to, you know, things like Chili's, you know, and Applebee's bring down their price point, where it was, you know, basically close to equivalent pricing to go have a sit-down meal at a Chili's and Applebee's than going to your normal QSR. You actually saw share shift move from QSR to full-service dining, which almost never happens in an environment where people are value-based.
I wonder if that switches back now this year because the QSR businesses do have more ability to bring down price quickly. I think that's a distinct trend that we're watching, something I try to observing. The last trend we're seeing is certainly some stabilization in the restaurant market. Last year was a brutal market for the restaurant category. You know, the incredible amount of our chains had negative same-store sales traffic. You know, I think 50%+. That was an incredible statistic. Now they were able to manage revenue with price increases and the businesses, you know, certainly continue to prosper. That was an amazing change to see.
A lot of it happened after the, you know, April Liberation Day when you just saw these crazy spikes down in traffic into the QSR category. Q4 of last year, you saw the destabilization and the holiday period was quite strong. You know, we're continuing to kinda see that stabilization. Now we're not seeing like this, like it going rocketing back upwards, but I think that's a good sign, both for our business, but also I think it's really good for the U.S. economy.
It's really interesting. look, in conclusion, just curious, what's next for PAR? You've had a lot of different acts throughout the years, but they've all augmented the same platform strategy. What's the next thing?
For us, it's pretty simple. You know, we've got a really simple plan. You know, first and foremost is, you know, build and ship these AI products super cost effectively to kind of prove not only that our business is protected by AI, but this is actually gonna be a massive accelerant to our business. The second is to actually, you know, take our own medicine. We're gonna use AI to go cut $15 million of costs internally. It's a super aggressive target, but you know, if you don't mandate it'll never happen. We're gonna become really operationally efficient through that. I think the third is just this interesting story of, you know, year-over-year, we're a much bigger business, but we're not, you know, planning to decelerate.
I think that includes not wanting any, you know, new large deals. It doesn't include any of these AI products working. I think the point being that the business itself is just doing really, really well without any of these investment ideas working, we certainly think these investment ideas are gonna work.
Great. Any final questions? Awesome. Savneet, thanks very much.
Thanks, Neil.