Artificial intelligence has quickly moved from an experimental technology to an operational question for franchise brands. The conversation is no longer simply whether franchisors should use AI. In 2026, the bigger questions are where it belongs, what should be automated, what data a franchise system should collect and how technology can make individual franchisees better operators.
Automate the Work Around the Work
The easiest way to understand AI’s potential in franchising may be to stop asking, “What can we replace?” and start asking, “What gets in the way?”
Franchisees routinely spend time scheduling employees, responding to leads, compiling reports, managing administrative tasks and interpreting performance data. Increasingly, those are areas where automation can help.
<a href="https://griswoldhomecarefranchise.com/?utm_source=1851franchise.com&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=building-modern-franchise-brand-2026-ai-automation-data-2733246″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Griswold, for example, is exploring AI and automation for Caregiver scheduling and rescheduling, lead management, analytics and other back-end processes.
“With Griswold, we are using AI, but not to replace Caregivers,” said Steve Turner, chief operating officer. “It’s about helping us to do what we do best. It doesn’t replace the core of the business of helping people stay safe in their home. The second way we can leverage AI technology is to help us behind the scenes operationally. We can use technology in the back end to make ourselves more efficient and more effective.”
Across franchising, similar use cases are emerging. AI tools can help route and follow up with leads, analyze sales conversations, identify struggling locations and surface information that might otherwise be buried in reports. In 2026, the IFA highlighted franchise-specific technologycapable of turning unit-level financial and operational data into natural-language summaries and identifying trends for franchisees and field teams.
The opportunity isn’t simply saving a few minutes on a task. At scale, automation can give hundreds of franchisees more consistent processes while allowing corporate teams to focus their attention where human judgment adds the most value.
Data Has to Become Actionable
Franchise systems have always generated enormous amounts of information. The problem is that collecting data isn’t the same as knowing what to do with it. A modern franchise brand should increasingly be able to connect information across locations, identify patterns and translate those patterns into decisions.
Instead of giving a franchisee another dashboard, for example, technology can potentially tell an owner that labor costs are moving outside the system benchmark, lead response times have increased or a particular sales behavior correlates with better conversion.
Griswolddemonstrates how the same principle can extend beyond business analytics and into the customer experience. Through technology partnerships, the brand has explored tools that use AI to recognize patterns in a Client’s home and identify changes that could indicate a need for additional care. Its work with Sensi.AI, for example, has involved audio-based monitoring technology designed to detect potential falls, distress and calls for help without using cameras.
“We can almost have a set of eyes to help family members feel more comfortable and help us know what is going on,” Turner said. “That allows families to have insights and also allows us to know if they need more or less care.”
Here, data isn’t valuable because there is more of it. It’s valuable because it can prompt an action.
Tech-Forward Brands Can Attract Tech-Forward Franchisees
Technology can also shape who wants to join a franchise system. Turner said Griswold has seen multiple new owners come from technology careers over the past 18 months. One of them is Hao Sun, who spent more than a decade in digital health and previously founded a company using AI to improve patient recruitment and retention for clinical trials.
Sun understood AI’s potential firsthand. But when his own grandparents needed care during the pandemic, his family struggled to find reliable Caregivers.
“I’ve always been driven by improving health care because that’s what I studied and what I’m passionate about,” Sun said. “I really like the idea of being able to influence health care outcomes on a large scale by developing innovative AI solutions.”
His experience eventually led him to Griswold, where technology could complement rather than replace personalized care. “I realized this kind of personalized, localized care is more meaningful and even more impactful than what I was doing before,” Sun said.
For emerging franchise brands, that points to another advantage of investing thoughtfully in technology. Sophisticated candidates increasingly expect sophisticated systems. A franchisor that can demonstrate how it uses data, automation and AI to improve unit-level operations may be better positioned to resonate with entrepreneurs accustomed to technology-driven workplaces.
Don’t Adopt AI Just to Say You Have AI
There is still reason for caution. AI adoption across franchising is growing faster than the industry’s ability to prove its impact. The 2026 Annual Franchise Development Reportfound that 52% of surveyed brands were already using AI tools in franchise development, but 68% said it was still too early to determine whether AI was generating more franchise deals.
Modernizing a franchise system shouldn’t mean layering new software onto every process or chasing each new AI product that enters the market. Franchisors still need to evaluate costs, data quality, privacy, security, accuracy and whether franchisees will actually use a tool once it is introduced.
The technology should solve a defined problem.
For one brand, that might mean automatically responding to leads after hours. For another, it could mean identifying unit-level performance problems sooner. For Griswold, it can mean making scheduling more efficient while using AI-powered monitoring to provide additional insight into client safety.
Build a Brand That Gets Smarter as It Grows
The real promise of AI, automation and data for franchising comes from scale. Every additional franchise location produces information: sales patterns, labor trends, customer behavior, marketing performance and operational successes and failures. Historically, much of that knowledge remained trapped inside individual locations, spreadsheets or reports.
A modern franchise system has the opportunity to learn from all of it.
The goal is to create a network where insights from one part of the system can make another part stronger, where routine work becomes easier to execute and where franchisees can make decisions based on what is actually happening across the brand.
The franchise brands that future-proof themselves in 2026 won’t necessarily be the ones using the most AI. They’ll be the ones that know exactly where technology creates value, turn their data into action and preserve the human capabilities that made the business worth franchising in the first place.
Want to learn more about how 1851 helps franchisors grow their franchises with confidence? Visit www.1851growthclub.comand see what we can do for you.
Don’t Miss the Next Big Franchise Story
Luca Piacentini
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