Jen Bargisen
If you’ve ordered food or drinks at a football stadium in the past few years, chances are that Jen Bargisen, a student in the Daniels College of Business Executive MBA program, had something to do with the experience.
Bargisen specializes in using AI and other technology to optimize food and beverage operations at more than 400 stadiums and other venues around the world that contract with Sodexo Live! for their concessions.
“Our goal is, ‘How can we take what we already know about what we do and make it better and take it into the future?’” said Bargisen, the vice president of culinary and experience transformation, North America. “For example, every AI model on Earth has been trained on published food content, and published food content is biased toward what worked in a photo studio or a 40-seat dining room. None of it knows what falls apart at 50,000 covers with a temporary workforce. The architecture question I’m working on is how you get that judgment into a system so it can screen an idea before it ever reaches a guest.”
Using AI at Stadium Scale
Bargisen has run food and beverage operations for Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis and the Indiana Convention Center, as well as multiple Olympic Games and Super Bowls. She provides national culinary leadership across venues including the Tennessee Titans’ new Nissan Stadium in Nashville, Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium and, previously, the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
Bargisen said one of her favorite parts of the job is thinking about how to anticipate customer needs, streamline services, and optimize technology in a way that still feels comfortable and welcoming.
“I like that I’m able to take not just my experience, but the decades of experience of everybody around me, and use that to create better human moments,” she said.
Bargisen has a business degree from Georgia Tech and an associate’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America, which is where she launched her career in food and beverage. She came to the Daniels EMBA program to expand her business knowledge and make connections.
Why the Daniels Executive MBA stood out
The EMBA is designed for established senior leaders looking to advance their careers and grow their networks. The curriculum mirrors the challenges they face in their day-to-day work, taught by faculty who are knowledgeable academics and experienced business professionals.
Another signature element of the Daniels EMBA is the cohort structure, which puts a diverse set of seasoned professionals in the same room to learn from each other’s experience and expertise. The group becomes the core of a powerful network after graduation.
“I got accepted to some other programs, but they were all online,” she said. “The in-person aspect was a critical thing for me. And the longer I’m here, the more I know I made the right choice. We have a nice 50-50 split of people who want to be enterprise leaders and people who are more entrepreneurial.”
An expert in the business use of AI, Bargisen has given lectures about her use of the technology in a few of her Daniels classes.
“Knowing what we know about our customers, about our food, about all these other things, how can we get our data to talk to us?” she said. “I’ve been building tools that our teams can use.”
Turning data into better guest experiences
Among those tools is one that Bargisen is using as she plans logistics for the new Nissan Stadium in Nashville. Using reams of previously conducted research, she created an AI focus group that will respond the same way as a group of actual Titans fans.
“I give it menus or images of food, and it assembles a full synthetic focus group,” she said. “It calls the right people in, it has their demographics, and they respond to it and give me feedback. Even if I only get 50% better before we give it to the first fan, it’s a lot better than when we were doing none of that.”
What excites Bargisen most about the use of AI is automating processes so that members of her team can spend more time doing what they really enjoy.
“I got into this field because I wanted to be central to people remembering moments in their life: ‘I remember what that dinner tasted like the day we got married,’ or, ‘I remember that wine pairing when we were at that restaurant in Greece.’ I wanted to be part of creating that magic,” she said. “When you start feeding 100,000 people, you forget that that’s what it’s all about. I’m excited about re-energizing that in people, trying to bring them back to that.”