AI is no longer a futuristic concept—it’s already transforming the restaurant industry. While the idea of a fully automated restaurant might seem a little intimidating, the reality is that AI is best used as an assistant to help with daily tasks, not as a complete replacement for human work. In fact, according to Deloitte, 36% of restaurant owners expect AI to improve restaurant operations, loyalty programs, procurement, or supply chain management.
While AI is expected to displace some jobs, the World Economic Forum predicts that AI will also create 170 million new jobs by 2030. “The key is to see AI for what it is,” says Nicholas Florek, head of Backofhouse.io. “It’s a powerful assistant that handles the repetitive tasks, so you and your team can focus on what you do best: providing great food and a memorable human experience.”
AI as Your Back-of-House Assistant
AI is a powerful tool for analyzing vast amounts of data and performing complex calculations quickly. This makes it an ideal assistant for many back-of-house and operational tasks.
1. Staffing and HR
- Labor Forecasting: AI can predict your staffing needs by analyzing historical sales data to help you avoid overstaffing.
- Hiring: AI can streamline the hiring process by scanning resumes for keywords and even conducting initial interviews to evaluate candidates.
- Scheduling: AI can create and adjust staff schedules automatically, helping to optimize shifts and ensure proper coverage.
- Retention: AI can monitor employee feedback to identify dissatisfaction and help improve employee retention.
- Our Suggested Tools: Opus uses AI to automate onboarding and role-based training, saving managers up to 10 hours a week and reducing ramp time by 25% through mobile-first, multilingual learning paths. 7Shifts help restauranteurs make more profitable decisions, improve team retention, and get operations in order.
2. Inventory and Kitchen Operations
- Predictive Ordering: AI can predict inventory needs based on various data points, helping you manage stock more efficiently.
- Shelf-Life Monitoring: AI can track the freshness of ingredients and alert staff when an item is nearing its expiration date.
- Menu Adjustments: AI can suggest changes to your menu based on changes in food costs.
- Prep and Planning: Lots of information goes into food prep. Narrow AI can provide sales forecasts based on previous data, while general AI can create a full action plan for food production using thousands of data points.
- Our Suggested Tool: Toast and SpotOn both have new AI capabilities to quickly analyze POS data and provide quick, high priority actions to improve your sales.
Using AI to Enhance the Customer Experience
Beyond the back-of-house, AI is also a game-changer for customer-facing operations and marketing.
1. Marketing and Sales
- Targeting and Personalization: AI can analyze customer data to help you reach the right audience with tailored marketing messages.
- Promotions: AI can predict the right time to offer a promotion to a specific person to maximize its impact.
- Content Creation: AI can automatically generate social media posts and email content, freeing up your time to focus on other tasks.
- Our Suggested Tool: Owner has a tool called RestaurantGPT which grades your restaurant’s online health score and provides ideas for improvement so that you show up online and gain more in-person foot traffic.
2. Customer Service
- Voice Ordering: AI-powered systems can handle full conversations with customers, taking orders, answering questions about allergens, and even making recommendations.
- Chatbots: A conversational chatbot on your website can handle online orders and answer common customer questions.
- Our Suggested Tool: Loman.ai is a 24/7 AI phone answering service for restaurants that can take orders, syncs with your point-of-sale system to streamline orders, reservations, and more.
By integrating AI to handle complex data and repetitive tasks across back-of-house operations—such as labor forecasting, scheduling, and predictive ordering—as well as customer-facing needs like personalized marketing and voice ordering, you can dramatically streamline your business. Embracing these new technologies and tools ultimately allows you and your team to focus on what you do best: providing great food and a memorable human experience.
