Across the foodservice industry, AI is impacting operators’ ability to pinpoint inefficiencies and make real-time adjustments. This year, look for the technology to help restaurants streamline menus during busy shifts – making it possible to focus on items that require less complicated preparation when a kitchen is at capacity or understaffed, according to TechHQ. In a similar vein, AI is allowing more restaurants to use dynamic pricing during peak periods so they can maximize the benefits of churning out orders at those times – or possibly encourage people to stagger those orders at off-peak hours. On the menu itself, AI can identify a restaurant’s most profitable items (or unprofitable items) and highlight the winners for guests in order to help drive more sales in that direction. AI has applications after the meal too: A recent Paytronix report says restaurants on its ordering platform will be able to use a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to automatically engage with guests after they finish their meal, then route their feedback to the store manager. Artificial intelligence may already be supporting various tasks in your restaurant, from automating scheduling to monitoring inventory to personalizing staff training. But it can also serve as a self-contained brainstorming meeting of sorts by helping you develop new ideas that can keep your restaurant fresh for guests. For example, in recent months, chef Tom Aviv made headlines for using Dall-E, the image generator from OpenAI, to design the menu and décor for his restaurant Branja in Miami. One of the results was a chocolate mousse inspired by Picasso. Such uses of AI tools can help you formulate new recipes, identify different ingredient combinations, create engaging menu descriptions, and help you identify ways to bring your restaurant’s décor and online presence into better alignment with your brand. These tools need human intervention to generate the best results, but if you give them increasingly specific prompts, they can trigger new ideas in you that you can use to offer exciting experiences to guests. Artificial intelligence may feel like one technology that’s more in the purview of larger, well-resourced brands than smaller ones, but increasingly, restaurants of all kinds are demonstrating how the technology can be helpful – and it doesn’t have to come at great expense. To be sure, AI is embedded in tech tools that help restaurants schedule staff and anticipate traffic flow. But a panel at the recent Fast Casual Executive Summit revealed that brands are experimenting with AI in a range of simpler ways that may make a difference to restaurants that haven’t already adopted a lot of tech. Your loyalty program, for instance, should use AI to help you pinpoint lapsed guests and target them with the right messages. Even using ChatGPT for free (or for a low subscription cost) may help you generate new ideas for hashtags in your social media posts, fine-tune job descriptions you can use to recruit staff, or come up with taglines to use in your online advertising. The speed with which artificial intelligence has become an everyday tool in our lives can leave people both excited about its potential and wary of its risks. The same is true about the use of AI in restaurant operations. If your staff is stuck somewhere between wanting to embrace it and resisting it, help them separate fact from fiction. AI can support your restaurant by helping your managers create more efficient schedules, predict sales and facilitate communication among staff. What AI can’t do is replace human roles – it’s more about streamlining tedious tasks within a restaurant, reducing errors and freeing up time for staff to serve guests. More broadly, its integration with a restaurant’s existing POS can help operators more readily connect the dots between their data sources and make key decisions that will help optimize the business. There is no doubt that AI will play a key role in the development of the industry, so it’s important to embrace its applications – but it still requires people to monitor it as they use it to make decisions. As artificial intelligence becomes a larger part of consumers’ daily lives, it is taking a couple of distinct paths in the restaurant industry. Its generative applications are helping restaurants respond in real time to guest questions in the drive-thru line, as well as draft emails to staff and develop ideas for guest promotions. Its predictive applications are enabling restaurants to make more educated decisions about how to manage inventory, schedule staff, and anticipate guest traffic over a holiday weekend. These applications are increasingly being woven into restaurant tech platforms and becoming just a part of doing business – Square and AzureOpenAI are among the companies whose generative and predictive AI applications being adopted by large brands right now, Restaurant Dive reports. When deciding where to invest in technology improvements, it makes sense to focus on the back of the house first. Once you have support with employee scheduling, inventory management and other operational functions, your staff should have more time to deliver positive experiences for guests (which also helps them feel more positive about their jobs). This is the approach that Domino’s – long a trendsetter in the restaurant tech space – is taking with their embrace of new AI tools the brand is developing in partnership with Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service. According to a recent report from Nation’s Restaurant News, Domino’s is working on a generative AI assistant to support employees and personalize customer service, with special focus on invisible back-of-house technology. The brand’s chief technology officer said she believes helping the team access information and make decisions more quickly can help them respond more promptly and effectively when mistakes are made. This makes people’s jobs easier to do – and will likely trickle into the front of the house in the form of shorter order times, fewer mistakes and a better overall experience. It’s worth bearing in mind as you consider tech priorities, regardless of whether you’re implementing generative AI or not. Each month, artificial intelligence-powered tools are being adopted in more guest-facing restaurant roles. As a recent article in The Spoon put it, we will likely see the biggest use of this technology in quick-service roles, in particular, because they tend to be lower-paying, higher-turnover jobs. Wendy’s and White Castle are two such brands stepping into this territory – and now delivery providers including Uber Eats and DoorDash also have plans in the works for AI-powered ordering. Once brands have established some history with guest-facing AI, we’ll know more about how it is impacting order accuracy, labor challenges and the guest experience. If the changes are positive, restaurants beyond the quick-service category may well look for ways to weave it into their models too. Could you see a way to use chatbots or other AI tools to support your service? Right now and into the foreseeable future, artificial intelligence-powered technology is being used to augment human skills by taking on tedious tasks and serving as an assistant to human workers. For example, as a recent Nation’s Restaurant News article indicates, a restaurant using AI-powered tech to track human employees packing orders can alert a staff member in real time when they should put fries in a bag to ensure they don’t get cold waiting to be collected. That said, tasks that are already handled by assistants now — scheduling staff, ordering food and other administrative tasks, for example — may soon be handled by AI with oversight from a restaurant’s general manager. As a result, assistant general manager roles could be reframed in the future. There is potential there to free up resources that can be reapplied in other areas. The Nation’s Restaurant News 2023 Restaurant Technology Outlook survey found that while a large portion of restaurant operators are planning to invest in guest-facing technology, there is a large untapped opportunity in back-of-house artificial intelligence functions that aren’t visible to your guests. The survey found that only 12 percent of respondents say they use AI-powered sales forecasting and labor scheduling, for example. But there is great potential for savings in these back-of-house functions. Using AI in combination with your collected data can help you analyze your inventory to ensure you’re not overpaying for ingredients, as well as to automate payments — tasks that often require employee labor but don’t have to. Where might you be able to use AI for back-of-house tasks in ways that free up your staff? 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. |
Subscribe to our newsletterArchives
March 2024
Categories
All
|