AI for Franchising: Make Your FDD AI-Ready 🤖

Hello everyone!

We want to share how tech- first franchisors have been leveraging AI to find franchisees.

The truth is that thousands of qualified prospects are already using platforms such as ChatGPT to conduct their due diligence on franchising.

Now, it's a very regulated space.

So when AI agents are being asked for legal medical or investment advice, they either have to point to a valid source of data or refrain from answering the question altogether.

In franchising, that source of data is an FDD So how can I know if my brand is currently visible to AI?

On Wefranch, I can actually scan my FDD and check.

So in this case it says that no schema was detected, which means that the contents of the PDF are readable to humans but unreadable to machines.

So let's delve further into this.

AI agents can read parts of the PDF FDD text, but they cannot reliably interpret tables.

They cannot infer relationships between different items.

They will often misread visual layout because it is optimized for humans, not for machines.

Small formatting errors can really throw them off and they do have the tendency to fill in the gaps when they can't quite get the data required to output an answer to a user.

So what is the structured data that we're trying to get?

It is information organized in a standardized format recognized by both humans and computers.

And we both speak in different languages, so there needs to be sufficient data in both languages.

So here humans, will see an apple pie, so the picture the stars and there's going to be code in the backend that has been structured according to a schema.

So what is a schema?

It is a structured framework that organizes particular kind of information.

So any recipe that you can find on Google Search has been formatted according to the recipe schema and it will have unique properties, for a recipe such as cook time, nutrition and so on.

So so far in franchising we've had the first part so the human friendly PDF and we're now introducing the code that is readable to machines, that translates all of the information from the current FDD and makes it accessible to AI agents.

And in fact we have built this tool called the FDD Scheme Schema Builder and it has all of the 23 items and the exhibits and each section is built according to the requirements of the FTC to create a compliant FDD.

And as a result, when you build your FDD schema, on Wefranch, you will create a PDF file that looks the same as it used to be and is shareable with your prospects.

But as an invisible attachment it will have this JSON code file file that has converted all of the human, human friendly, data into the code that has been organized according to the FTD schema.

So each item will have unique properties, and the AI agents will know how to read it, how to interpret it, and they will be able to answer prospects questions about your brand.