“I’m trying to be the most AI-forward restaurant company that exists,” Damola Adamolekun said plainly, and then moved on to the next subject as if it were an ordinary executive goal. It is not. The 37-year-old CEO is pitching a technology-first future for a chain that has only just crawled out of bankruptcy and now operates more than 500 restaurants.
Adamolekun returned Red Lobster to private hands in 2024 when Fortress Investment Group bought the chain out of bankruptcy and installed him as the company’s youngest CEO. He spent the past two years hauling the brand back from a sequence of strategic missteps — closing roughly 130 of nearly 650 locations, remodeling dining rooms and reintroducing Endless Shrimp at a higher starting price in April 2024 — and now he wants each department to find its own AI use cases rather than imposing a single companywide system.
That directive is the clearest signal yet of how he wants to run the place. “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,” he told interviewers, asking restaurant managers and corporate teams to look for ways the technology can shave costs, speed decisions or free employees for other tasks.
The stakes are measurable. Red Lobster’s scale — more than 500 sites left from nearly 650 at the chain’s peak — means any successful operational gains could ripple across kitchens, supply chains and marketing. It also explains why Adamolekun’s pitch lands as more than PR: Fortress and company leadership have already turned to swift, tangible fixes to stabilize the business, and AI promises a different class of leverage if it can be implemented without new brand risk.
Adamolekun’s playbook since 2024 has been practical and unvarnished. He closed weaker stores to protect profitable ones, remodeled dining rooms to lift the guest experience and retooled Endless Shrimp after the chain’s costly 2023 promotion. The $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp deal made permanent in 2023 cost the chain roughly $11 million in a single quarter; Adamolekun brought the promo back in April 2024 with a starting price around $25 and said he wouldn’t repeat the original pricing mistake “because I know how to do math.”
His personal story is shorthand for the approach: born in Nigeria in 1989, raised in Zimbabwe and the Netherlands before moving to Springfield, Illinois, at nine, Adamolekun landed an internship at Goldman Sachs at 19 while at Brown University, later worked in private equity at TPG and at Paulson & Co., and became CEO of P.F. Chang’s at 31, helping push that brand past $1 billion in annual revenue. Those stops read as a resume built for restructuring and growth, and they explain why Fortress entrusted him with a brand many customers still feel sentimental about. “People just really care about this brand. It has a deep legacy and a deep meaning to people,” he said.
But the friction is obvious. Red Lobster’s troubles predate Adamolekun: a 2014 sale to Golden Gate Capital for $2.1 billion followed by a $1.5 billion sale-leaseback of real estate, later investment from Thai Union and a series of product and pricing choices that left the chain overexposed. The 2024 bankruptcy and subsequent closures were the consequence. Now Adamolekun is asking teams — kitchens, procurement, marketing, operations — to invent AI uses while they are still repairing a damaged brand and consolidating a smaller footprint.
That gap matters. Asking departments to propose their own AI solutions delegates creativity but also leaves unanswered how the company will govern projects, measure savings, protect customer data and avoid replicating past mistakes born of bad incentives. Red Lobster has already shown it can correct course on menu economics; translating that skill to AI will require clear rollout plans and guardrails, neither of which Adamolekun has outlined publicly.
For now the company’s next steps are internal and procedural: each department is charged with identifying AI opportunities, and executives will have to decide which pilots become corporate standards. If successful, those pilots could change staffing models, ordering accuracy and marketing efficiency across more than 500 restaurants. If they fail or are poorly managed, they could become a costly distraction while the chain continues to mend its balance sheet and reputation.
Adamolekun frames the experiment as both a challenge and a promise. “I like that I’m giving people a different sort of role model—a different path for people that they might not be aware of otherwise,” he said, positioning Red Lobster not just as a seafood brand but as a place to try new operating models. The unresolved question now is not whether Red Lobster will try AI — it will — but whether the company’s recovery roadmap can absorb the risk of a technology overhaul before the rollout plan, governance and metrics are in place.
