Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing, bonus story of the week.

Today on Forbes, from fax machines to AI, how Chipotle's CTO revolutionized its digital business.

When Kurt Garner became Chipotle's first chief information officer in 2015, he was shocked to learn that a staggering amount of

online orders to the Mexican food chain's 2,000 restaurants were coming from old school

fax machines, a whopping $22.5 million in sales that year.

Garner, who was 56 years old, recalled, quote, you'd go to our website and you'd download a fax form.

You'd fill out the form and fax it to the restaurant.

If you faxed an order in, you didn't get a confirmation that it was received,

and you still had to stand in the line to pay.

It was a pretty fragmented thing.

Fax-based orders represented only 0.05% of the 1993 founded chain's total digital sales at the time.

But in his quest to digitize Chipotle, Garner soon put a stop to it,

starting a campaign to build its online business by architecting a digital transformation

with app orders and rewards-based loyalty.

In his decade-long tenure, first to CIO and now as president and chief strategy and technology

officer, Chipotle's digital sales have skyrocketed from $225 million in 2015, only 5% of total

$4.5 billion in revenue that year, to nearly $4 billion,

topping 35% of 2024's $11.3 billion in revenue.

Today, Chipotle's digital business has become what he calls, quote, a multi-billion dollar growth

engine,

connecting 3,900 restaurants nationwide,

and a rewards program with 20 million active users,

...