Restaurants need to invest in technology in order to compete, but the options can be dizzying – and available funds limited. Still, it’s important to regularly assess where your business could benefit from tech if and when you are able to invest in systems to help you scale. Start with your POS system. It’s the brain of your restaurant and needs to be able to connect seamlessly with all of your added tech for functions across your business to run smoothly. Are you using its full functionality? From there, look to your biggest pain points and labor burdens. Automated tools that help you manage your inventory, order streams and food prep are logical next places to build up from a solid POS.

When a job candidate submits an application to work at your restaurant, how quickly do you respond? Chances are this person is looking at a range of open positions at a variety of businesses. The first company to respond to them stands a great chance of hiring them, assuming the interviewing process goes well. If a slow response time is making you miss out on good candidates, there are tech tools you can harness to automate the process of making the initial connection with potential staff and selling them on your culture. Workstream, for one, created a ChatGPT-powered chatbot that ushers job candidates through the various stages of the recruitment process and helps match them with potential jobs. Consider what tools might help you fill gaps in your communication with potential hires.

Is there room for you to remove manual processes from your inventory management? Adopting an automated inventory management system that integrates with your POS can help your business more quickly identify problems that waste resources. You can remove human error from the ordering process, forecast your needs more accurately, lower your food costs, and more quickly pinpoint where you’re experiencing product theft, breakage, spoilage or other waste. Having real-time information at your fingertips simply makes you nimble. As this report from Restaurant Technology News indicates, these tools help you monitor stock levels and their corresponding value in real time, which helps you calculate recipe costs and ensure you’re offering a profitable combination of items as you swap ingredients in and out.

​As the food supply chain has gotten more widespread and more complex, it’s become all the more important to monitor it closely. Artificial intelligence can help with that. As food safety specialist Francine Shaw explained in a recent article for FSR Magazine, operators can use AI-based systems to continuously collect and analyze data from many sources, ranging from the FDA to public records, then verify that suppliers are following correct safety protocols. Such tools are available, affordable and can help build trust across your supply chain. Of course, as with all AI tools, they are only as good as the data they are trained on. It’s important to collect accurate data within your operation and audit your AI applications often to make sure you’re getting the most from them.

In the past few years, restaurant operators have made countless consumer-facing, tech-based tweaks to make themselves more nimble in the face of a fast-evolving dining landscape: In came QR codes, ordering kiosks, app-based ordering and other low-touch tools to connect diners with restaurant meals. But the landscape is shifting yet again. Operators are now noticing that some of these tools have better staying power than others – and striking the right balance between low-touch and high-service requires being in tune with guests and possibly recalibrating your approach. According to a recent Forbes report, for example, QR codes, third-party delivery apps and ghost kitchens have been losing their luster. (A recent survey from US Foods confirmed that 76 percent of people prefer paper menus or in-person ordering to QR codes.) It may be about consumer fatigue over clunky QR code ordering interfaces, reluctance about paying a premium for delivery in what has been a high inflationary environment, and/or sentiment that the restaurant experience delivered by these tools doesn’t feel as worthwhile as it could. Do you know, on a given day, how your guests are responding to the tools you offer to streamline your ordering experience – and how this compares with the previous week or month, for example? This is where your guest data can reveal patterns about what’s working and where you need to make changes. For example, being able to pull up data that helps you identify key pivot points – like what price maximizes a menu item’s profits without turning people away, and where your efforts at personalization are driving traffic – can help you use the tools you have on hand to make the experience you offer feel as worthwhile as possible.

Leaning on tech tools to deliver your food safety training isn’t just more efficient – it can also set you up to make your training sink in for staff. Consider implementing tools that gamify your food safety lessons or at least make them more interactive for staff. Tech-based training can help you use different approaches to teaching that ensure you’re delivering content in a way that reaches a range of learning styles. Finally, tech tools make it easier for you to make training a continuous process for your staff – not a one-and-done task but an ongoing, understood part of your culture. These platforms are dynamic and designed to help you deliver updates and new information better than a manual training system could.

Amid the rise in labor costs and the difficulty of retaining labor altogether, it’s understandable that more restaurants would be adopting technology to automate a wide range of tasks traditionally handled by people – or even for well-resourced brands to fully automate their prep lines. However, we’re seeing some of the first signs of pushback from both terminated employees and disillusioned guests who are speaking out about the decline of human connection at restaurants. To be sure, most restaurants aren’t going the way of robotic servers and line cooks. But as you automate more processes – particularly those that face the customer – consider what makes people want to work in restaurants and what makes the experience feel special for your guests. Find ways to retain the human touch (even indirectly) without sacrificing efficiency. Often, it’s the interpersonal interactions that make a restaurant feel like a good place to work and to eat.

How connected is your kitchen? Adopting “smart” devices to handle tedious tasks – and to simply take on a share of the mental load required to help a kitchen run smoothly – can deliver many benefits. It frees your staff to spend more time interacting with guests. It helps manage cooking times so food isn’t overcooked. It helps keep compliance records on track. It can alert a manager to problems with appliances so you can avoid losing a cooler full of inventory in the event of a power outage or equipment malfunction. This is one area of restaurant tech where it’s a bit easier to make gradual changes as operators can afford to make them. What manual processes still exist in your kitchen that could be streamlined through Internet connectivity?

One of the biggest trends to emerge from the National Restaurant Association Show this year has been the rise of automated tools intended to be used not in place of human labor, but alongside it. This includes such innovations as a stir-fry machine that prompts its human counterpart when it’s time to add ingredients, and a bowl-making, self-cleaning robot that can be used alongside humans in a food prep assembly line to cook and assemble meals. The common thread emerging from these new tools is that they don’t require their users to have culinary skills to prepare a tasty, consistent meal – just the ability to follow instructions. As the technology becomes more widely adopted, it is likely to transform what tasks a restaurant needs staff to manage, how operators train staff, and how much training is even required to get new employees up and running.