See inside Bojangles' new headquarters
Why it matters: Despite expanding quickly into new markets like Houston, New Jersey and Las Vegas in recent years, the Charlotte-born fried chicken chain is doubling down in its hometown with this latest investment.
"We're gonna be here for a long time," Bojangles CEO Jose Armario tells Axios.
Zoom in: The 60,000-plus-square-foot facility at 500 Forest Point Circle has a full-scale test kitchen and more collaborative workspaces.
Bojangles CEO Jose Armario emphasized the importance of finding a single-floor layout to bring workers together. Previously, Bojangles' staff was split between two buildings.
"We've only been in it for a week, and we're able to get stuff done so much more quickly because people are right there and you just reach across the aisle," said Lindsey Halson, senior director of training and development at Bojangles.
The facility is called the "Support Center" because it's designed to support all the restaurants. It houses departments ranging from finance to culinary to marketing to legal.
Of the 233 workers who could report to the center, about half spend most of their time in restaurants, Armario says. The other half are in the building three to five days a week.
The intrigue: The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the chain is working with investment bankers on a potential $1.5 billion sale. But the newspaper states Bojangles "may decide against selling after all."
Armario said Bojangles does not want to comment on rumors.
Bojangles was acquired by private-equity firms in 2019 for $590 million. Since then, it has grown from about 600 restaurants to more than 830 today.
"Our job here is to take care of business, take care of our customers, and let things be what they are going to be. We don't control that," Armario added. "What we do control is the day-to-day experience, and we're doing that pretty well. We want to continue to do it well and build on it, and I think that will ensure the success of this brand for decades to come."
Take a look around the new headquarters:
Bojangles commissioned art from students at UNC Charlotte and the Northwest School of the Arts. The theme was "It's Bo Time…Everywhere."
The entrance to the center has a timeline of Bojangles' history on the wall.
The Founders Wall recognizes the creators of Bojangles: Richard Thomas and Jack Fulk.
The Richard Thomas Center for Learning and Leadership Development is a 75-plus-seated room with a view into a kitchen that will be used to train restaurant managers.
The kitchen is also used for product development.
Bojangles recently introduced a Breakfast Bo-Rito — a wrap of sausage, eggs, crispy Bo-Rounds, Monterey Jack cheese and gravy.
Some rooms are named after popular menu items like Cajun filet and seasoned fries.
A mother's room with a rocking chair for employees to use.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Axios
5 hours ago
- Axios
Exclusive: Embedded tax startup April raises $38M
April, an embedded tax platform, has raised $38 million in a Series B round led by QED Investors, founder Ben Borodach tells Axios exclusively. Why it matters: Embedding tax tools directly into financial apps can improve financial decision-making and boost customer retention. Zoom in: Nyca Partners and Team8 also participated in the Series B round, bringing the total funding April has raised to date to $78 million. How it works: Fintech apps and financial institutions use April's APIs to integrate tax filing and planning directly into their platforms, enabling year-round, real-time tax management. April operates on a SaaS-based model, offering flat-rate pricing to fintech partners, who can choose to mark up services for their end customers. "Our vision is to embed tax in every financial decision," Borodach says. "Taxes should be happening where you're managing your money. They should be happening in real time, and they should be personalized to you." Context: New York-based April operates in a market dominated by legacy tax-preparation giants like Intuit, H&R Block, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer. But it recently became the first new company in 15 years to achieve national e-file coverage in all 50 states, Borodach says. The company has also launched a series of new products over the past year, including pro-assisted and pro-led tax filing, quarterly estimate tools for small business owners, and paycheck withholding optimizers. As a result, it is seeing increased demand from wealth management platforms, including integrations with digital advisers catering to mass-affluent clients and an upcoming partnership with a trillion-dollar asset manager. By the numbers: April claims it can reduce the time it takes to prepare and file taxes from the IRS' reported 13‑hour average down to just 22 minutes. The company processed hundreds of thousands of returns through partnerships with over 50 fintech apps and financial institutions this past tax season. It has seen its business grow three times year-to-date and more than seven times over the past 12 months, Borodach says. What's next: The company is preparing to launch advanced tax planning tools around capital gains, retirement planning, and stock transactions.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
AI is driving mass layoffs in tech, but it's boosting salaries by $18,000 a year everywhere else, study says
You've read about it all over, including in Fortune Intelligence. Maybe you or friends have been impacted: artificial intelligence is already transforming work, not least hiring and firing. Nowhere is the impact more visible than in the labor market. The technology industry, the original epicenter of AI adoption, is now seeing many of its own workers displaced by the very innovations they helped create. Employers, racing to integrate AI into everything from cloud infrastructure to customer support, are trimming human headcount in software engineering, IT support, and administrative functions. The rise of AI-powered automation is accelerating layoffs in the tech sector, with impacted employees as high as 80,000 in one count. Microsoft alone is trimming 15,000 jobs while committing $80 billion to new AI investments. But labor market intelligence firm Lightcast is offering a ray of hope going forward. Job postings for non-tech roles that require AI skills are soaring in value. Lightcast's new 'Beyond the Buzz' report, based on analysis of over 1.3 billion job postings, shows that these postings offer 28% higher salaries—an average of nearly $18,000 more per year. The Lightcast research underscores the split in tech and non-tech hiring: job postings for AI skills in tech roles remain robust, but the proportion of AI jobs within IT and computer science has fallen, dropping from 61% in 2019 to just 49% in 2024. This signals an ongoing contraction of traditional tech roles as AI claims an ever-larger share of the work. AI demand explodes beyond tech Rather than stifling workforce prospects, Lightcast's research suggests that AI is dispersing opportunity across the broader economy. More than half of all jobs requesting AI skills in 2024 appeared outside the tech sector—a radical reversal from previous years, when AI was confined to Silicon Valley and computer science labs. Fields like marketing, HR, finance, education, manufacturing, and customer service are rapidly integrating AI tools, from generative AI platforms that craft marketing content to predictive analytics engines that optimize supply chains and recruitment. In fact, job postings mentioning generative AI skills outside IT and computer science have surged an astonishing 800% since 2022, catalyzed by the proliferation of tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and DALL-E. Marketing, design, education, and HR are some of the fastest growers in AI adoption—each adapting to new toolkits, workflows, and ways of creating value. Cole Napper, VP of research, innovation, and talent insights at Lightcast, told Fortune in an interview that he was struck by the lack of a discernible pattern for which industries were most affected by the explosion of AI skills present in job postings, noting that the arts come top of the list. AI skills are in demand For the workforce at large, AI proficiency is emerging as one of today's most lucrative skill investments. Possessing two or more AI skills sends paychecks even higher, with a 43% premium on advertised salaries. In 2024, more than 66,000 job postings specifically mentioned generative AI as a skill, a nearly fourfold increase from the prior year, according to the Lightcast's 2025 Artificial Intelligence Index Report. Large language modeling was the second most common AI skill, which showed up in 19,500 open job posts. Postings listing ChatGPT and prompt engineering as skills ranked third and fourth in frequency, respectively. Sectors such as customer/client support, sales, and manufacturing reported the largest pay bumps for AI-skilled workers, as companies race to automate routine functions and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Christina Inge, founder of Thoughtlight, an AI marketing service, told Fortune in a message AI isn't just automating busywork, it's also becoming a tool AI-fluent workers can leverage to increase their own value to a company—and to outperform their peers. Take, for example, someone in sales using AI to create more targeted conversations to close deals faster, Inge wrote. The same can be said for customer service workers. '[Customer service workers fluent in AI] know how to interpret AI outputs, write clear prompts, and troubleshoot when things go off script,' Inge said. 'That combination of human judgment and AI fluency is hard to find and well worth the extra pay.' In fields like marketing and science, even single AI skills can yield large returns, while more technical positions gravitate to specialists with advanced machine learning or generative AI expertise. Crucially, the most valued AI-enabled roles demand more than just technical wizardry. Employers prize a hybrid skillset: communication, leadership, problem-solving, research, and customer service are among the 10 most-requested skills in AI-focused postings, alongside technical foundations like machine learning and artificial intelligence. 'While generative AI excels at tasks like writing and coding, uniquely human abilities—such as communication, management, innovation, and complex problem-solving—are becoming even more valuable in the AI era,' the study says. Winners and losers The emerging repercussions are striking. Tech workers whose roles are readily automated face rising displacement—unless they can pivot quickly into emerging areas that meld business, technical, and people skills. Meanwhile, millions of workers outside of tech are poised to translate even basic AI literacy into new roles or wage gains. The competitive edge now lies with organizations and professionals agile enough to combine AI capabilities with human judgement, creativity, and business acumen. For companies, the risk is clear: treating AI as an isolated technical specialty is now a liability. Winning firms are investing to embed AI fluency enterprise-wide, upskilling their marketing teams, HR departments, and finance analysts to build a future-ready workforce. AI may be the source of turmoil in Silicon Valley boardrooms, but its economic dividends are flowing rapidly to workers—and companies—in every corner of the economy. For those able to adapt, AI skills are not a harbinger of job loss, but a passport to higher salaries and new career possibilities. Still, the research doesn't indicate exactly where in the income levels the higher postings are coming, so Napper said it's possible that we are seeing some compression, with higher-paid tech jobs being phased out and lower-paying positions being slightly better-paying. Napper said the trend of AI skills cropping up in job postings has exploded over the past few years, and he doesn't expect a slowdown anytime soon. Napper said there's a 'cost to complacency'—one that includes a significant salary cut. He added that the 28% premium, Lightcast plans to release follow-up research on what level of the income latter the trend is hitting the most. For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Axios
8 hours ago
- Axios
AI's global race in the dark
The U.S.'s great AI race with China, now freshly embraced by President Trump, is a competition in the dark with no clear prize or finish line. Why it matters: Similar "races" of the past — like the nuclear arms race and the space race — have sparked innovation, but victories haven't lasted long or meant much. The big picture: Both Silicon Valley and the U.S. government now agree that we must invest untold billions to build supporting infrastructure for an error-prone, energy-hungry technology with an unproven business model and an unpredictable impact on the economy and jobs. What they're saying:"America is the country that started the AI race. And as president of the United States, I'm here today to declare that America is going to win it," Trump said at a Wednesday event titled "Winning the AI Race." Policy experts and industry leaders who promote the "race" idea argue that the U.S. and China are in a head-to-head competition to win the future of AI by achieving research breakthroughs, establishing the technology's standards and breaking the AGI or "superintelligence" barrier. They suggest that the world faces a binary choice between free, U.S.-developed AI imbued with democratic values or a Chinese alternative that's under the thumb of the Communist Party. Flashback: The last time a scientific race had truly world-shaping consequences was during the Second World War, as the Manhattan Project beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb. But Germany surrendered well before the U.S. had revealed or made use of its discovery. The nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union that followed was a decades-long stalemate that cost fortunes and more than once left the planet teetering on an apocalyptic brink. The 1960s space race was similarly inconclusive. Russia got humanity into space ahead of the U.S., but the U.S. made it to the moon first. Once that leg of the race was over, both countries retreated from further human exploration of space for decades. State of play: With AI, U.S. leaders are once again saying the race is on — but this time the scorecard is even murkier. "Build a bomb before Hitler" or "Put a man on the moon" are comprehensible objectives, but no one is providing similar clarity for the AI competition. The best the industry can say is that we are racing toward AI that's smarter than people. But no two companies or experts have the same definition of "smart" — for humans or AI models. We can't even say with confidence which of any two AI models is "smarter" right now, because we lack good measures and we don't always know or agree on what we want the technology to do. Between the lines: The "beat China" drumbeat is coming largely from inside the industry, which now has a direct line to the White House via Trump's AI adviser, David Sacks. "Whoever ends up winning ends up building the AI rails for the world," OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said at an Axios event in March. Arguing for controls on U.S. chip exports to China earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described competitor DeepSeek as "beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they're able to match the U.S. in AI." Yes, but: In the era of the second Trump administration, many Americans view their own government as increasingly authoritarian. With Trump himself getting into the business of dictating the political slant of AI products, it's harder for America's champions to sell U.S. alternatives as more "free." China has been catching up to the U.S. in AI research and development, most tech experts agree. They see the U.S. maintaining a shrinking lead of at most a couple of years and perhaps as little as months. But this edge is largely meaningless, since innovations propagate broadly and quickly in the AI industry. And cultural and language differences mean that the U.S. and its allies will never just switch over to Chinese suppliers even if their AI outruns the U.S. competition. In this, AI is more like social media than like steel, solar panels or other fungible goods. The bottom line: The U.S. and China are both going to have increasingly advanced AI in coming years. The race between them is more a convenient fiction that marshals money and minds than a real conflict with an outcome that matters.
