 One little food safety mistake in a restaurant can easily snowball into a bigger one. That’s why manual processes can leave so much room for error – and where tech can help keep you on track. Being able to perform daily, digitized audits of your operation helps ensure you can detect problems when they happen. Beyond that, it can pinpoint potential areas for improvement in your food handling practices, sanitation protocols and overall quality control procedures. There are financial benefits too, since these controls can keep your business in compliance and help it avoid the fines that come with regulatory violations. There are cultural benefits for a business too. As a report in Restaurant Technology News explains, your food safety auditing tech can keep your team focused on the same priorities and, should something go wrong, quickly identify if it’s about inadequate staff training, a supplier problem, equipment failure or other issue.
 Across restaurant categories, artificial intelligence is, oddly enough, making the restaurant experience feel a bit more human. As Danny Meyer, owner of Union Square Hospitality Group, recently said at an event hosted by IBM at one of his fine-dining restaurants, “By taking the guesswork out of the actual technical part of taking your order, [AI] allows us to put 100 percent of our hearts into making you feel welcome.” Specifically, the technology helps restaurants take better advantage of the data they have available, allowing them to better understand their guests and how they like to spend. As a result, they can boost their revenue because their inventory management and other back-office tasks are more efficient, and restaurant staff gain additional time back in their schedules – time they can pour into delivering better service. That translates into a more personal dining experience – or certainly the perception of one. At a time when consumers’ desire for meal personalization is so widespread and labor is an ongoing challenge, AI can be a game-changer for restaurants. Imagine you’re trying to manage a busy dinner rush and behind the scenes, your technology is making real-time menu adjustments to make sure you don’t sell out of key menu options. At the same time, it is upselling guests on other profitable items on your menu.
 Thinking about how technology can optimize your business can be overwhelming when there are so many options and potential factors to track. But it can also be a huge opportunity – to manage costs and to understand (and serve) your guests so much better than before. Take AI and its applications with menu pricing. At a time when many reports say consumers are reaching their limit when it comes to restaurant prices, it’s critical to know where the line between price and demand exists for your guests. If you have quality data about your business, AI can analyze it and come up with pricing strategies that consider your guests’ preferences, as well as how your traffic shifts based on the weather or time of day. Restaurants are at a point where they can use dynamic pricing like airlines have been using it for years (when a person takes a flight, they don’t assume they have paid the same price as their seatmate, right?). We’re approaching this point for restaurants. You can harness AI to create personalized pricing options for guests, to make pricing adjustments in real time based on the factors that work for your restaurant, and to strike the right balance between your prices and the demand they accommodate. You can also use your pricing to make your regular guests feel special – with offers and special prices that you appear to have dreamed up with only them in mind. New doors are opening that can help you build stronger connections with your guests. Are you gathering quality data and ensuring you’re making the best marketing decisions you can from it?
 Several years into managing ingredient inflation, supply chain snags and other strains on your bottom line, you may feel like you have raised menu prices to their limit – or that you’re running out of ways to cut costs. But AI automation is helping operators identify new ways to optimize operations at the front and back of the house, saving resources in the process. In a recent webinar from QSRweb, “When Raising Prices Isn’t Cutting It...How AI Automation Cuts Costs & Customer Complaints,” panelists discussed how AI can accomplish this through precision forecasting on multiple levels at once. For example, it can forecast how the weather next week is likely to impact your guests’ food preferences, guest traffic, and therefore your inventory and labor needs. It can ensure you have the right ingredients on hand at the right time, so your team isn’t scrambling to refill a key ingredient on the line just as people are lining up out your door during the lunch rush. It can help operators manage around particular scenarios – like if Joe doesn’t make it to work today, how will we manage his tasks effectively and safely? It can prevent the unfortunate ripple effect that can lead to mistakes, safety problems, and inconsistency – all issues that can impact guest experience, as well as staff morale and turnover. This frees managers up to deliver better guest experiences, which AI can also enhance by delivering personalized information about the people coming through your doors. Looking at your current operation, where are the bottlenecks, or areas where you feel you could use staff more effectively or deliver a better experience for guests? Could precision forecasting help?
 To be sure, consumers seem to expect more from in-restaurant dining nowadays. But delivering value and enhancing the overall guest experience doesn’t necessarily require sweeping changes. Some tech-supported improvements can help in a big way – and recent research suggests there is untapped potential here that can benefit restaurants. A survey from Incisiv about the future of restaurant dining found that the majority of restaurants are leaving opportunities on the table to use digital experiences to boost food’s emotional and communal power, as well as offer seamless and efficient service. Making improvements can include everything from simplifying group dining by allowing easy bill splitting to connecting guests with behind-the-scenes content about your ingredients. Similarly, efficiency tech (such as sensors to detect the presence of guests or in-restaurant app modes to allow guests to track orders) can improve the experience of guests, but these tools aren’t widely used in restaurants. Looking at your order streams, where is there room to make things more seamless – and in effect, exponentially enhance the experience for your guests?
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