Red Lobster's 37-year-old CEO says he's going to transform the seafood chain into 'the most AI-forward restaurant company that exists'

“I’m trying to be the most AI-forward restaurant company that exists,” Adamolekun said. “AI is important. I know a lot of people are scared of it or don’t want to deal with it, but you have to. It’s changing the game in a tremendous way.”

From Goldman Sachs to cheddar bay biscuits

Born in Nigeria in 1989 to a neurologist and a pharmacist, Damola Adamolekun was raised in Zimbabwe and the Netherlands before his family moved to Springfield, Illinois, when he was nine years old. He landed an internship at Goldman Sachs when he was just 19, while still a student-athlete at Brown University, then moved into private equity at TPG and a partnership at hedge fund Paulson & Co. His first big job in operations came in 2020, when he became CEO of P.F. Chang’s at age 31. He steered the Asian-fusion chain through the pandemic and helped push it past $1 billion in annual revenue.

When private equity firm Fortress Investment Group bought Red Lobster out of bankruptcy in 2024, it handed Adamolekun the keys, and he became the youngest CEO in the chain’s history.

Adamolekun inherited a major mess. Red Lobster’s troubles trace back to 2014, when Golden Gate Capital bought it from Darden Restaurants (NYSE: DRI) for $2.1 billion and financed much of the deal by selling the real estate beneath roughly 500 locations — a $1.5 billion “sale-leaseback” that turned a company that owned its buildings into one paying rent on them. (A sale-leaseback is exactly what it sounds like: you sell an asset, then lease it right back, swapping a big lump of cash now for ongoing payments later.) Shrimp supplier Thai Union later took a large stake and, Red Lobster alleged in its bankruptcy filing, steered the chain toward buying more of its own product. The infamous $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp deal, made permanent in 2023, cost Red Lobster roughly $11 million in a single quarter as diners camped at tables for hours.

When Adamolekun took over at Red Lobster, he remodeled its dining rooms, leaned back into the brand’s comfort-food roots, and personally answered unhappy customers on TikTok. He also told The Wall Street Journal in February that the chain needs to get smaller, closing weaker stores to protect profitable ones. And yes, he also brought back Endless Shrimp in April — but upped the prices to start around $25. As he explained in 2024, he wouldn’t repeat the original blunder “because I know how to do math.”

Betting Red Lobster’s comeback on AI

Adamolekun is now looking for the next big thing to push Red Lobster into the future, so naturally he — like so many business leaders across America — is turning to AI. But rather than impose one company-wide system, Adamolekun said he’s asking each department to find its own applications for automation: It can help HR create evaluations, presentations and training materials, for example, or help Red Lobster’s operations team compile a restaurant’s key metrics and put it all in a deck before he visits a location.

“Everybody’s got ideas if you give them the empowerment to come up with them,” Adamolekun told The Black Money Tree Podcast’s host Jerome D. Love.

Red Lobster also plans to hand sales forecasting — deciding how much food to order and how to staff each week — to AI. Right now, this is work his HQ team currently does by hand.

He even named his tool of choice. After his chief of staff vetted the field, Adamolekun said the company settled on Anthropic’s Claude, calling it the most powerful and accurate option for now while acknowledging that the lead changes constantly.

Adamolekun is far from the only restaurant boss looking at AI to cut down costs. By early 2026, more than a quarter of restaurant operators said they were using AI in some form, per the National Restaurant Association — up sharply from the roughly 16% who said they planned to invest two years earlier. And, as you might imagine, some of the bigger players are pouring millions into their AI efforts: Yum Brands built a proprietary platform with Nvidia now running across more than 28,000 locations, and Wendy’s partnered with Google on drive-thru voice ordering. More broadly, Big Tech poured a record $130.6 billion into AI in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and a growing chorus of investors — from Ray Dalio to fund managers surveyed by Bank of America — has warned the spending could be inflating a bubble reminiscent of the dot-com era.

“One of the advantages of being young is I understand the technology pretty well,” Adamolekun said. “I do think we’ll probably be the best AI company, because I don’t know that anybody’s pushing it as hard as I am.”