AI in Restaurants: How AI Transforming the Food Industry

Quick Summary: Are you exploring the potential of AI in restaurants? Artificial Intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s everywhere now. The food industry is already squeezing the AI juice, and if you are still to implement the advent, you are missing out on opportunities. Nevertheless, let bygone be bygone; consider implementing AI into your restaurant to streamline daily operations, deliver enhanced customer experiences, and increase overall efficiency. And, if you are wondering about AI use cases and how the technology helps you keep your business thriving, this article will help you explore it all.

Have you ever got food suggestions while ordering pizza, fast food, lunch, or dinner using an online food ordering platform? If yes, you have seen artificial intelligence in action. Even though AI has already disrupted every aspect of the restaurant management process, customer experience, and more, many experts believe, including the experts from Foodiv, that it’s likely to bring more to the table soon. With AI implementation, you can help your restaurant team and chefs free up their time and spend that time exploring their culinary and other creativities and activities.

However, AI is not limited to that (helping the team save time) only; it can transform every aspect of the restaurant business, including;

• Helping you provide highly personalized experiences
• Providing assistance to waitstaff
• Helping you identify repeat customers and provide enhanced services
• Minimizing the number of unsatisfactory orders
• Powering Food Preparation Robots
• Automating Order Processing
• Freeing Up Chefs’ Time
• Modeling Patrons’ Preferences
• Providing Unique Menus For Each Customer
• Adjusting Energy Usage
• Digitizing Recipes And Coaching Cooks
• Optimizing Supply Usage

While modern restaurants struggle to keep their consumers engaged, retain, and provide good customer experience, AI integration into the process can solve these touch points, improve overall restaurant operations, and deliver excellent customer experience. There are many areas within restaurants that consume a lot of time, effort, and resources. In some cases, you need to go through heavy investment and minimize profits. However, AI integration in restaurants can change the traditional way of working. In this article, we have discussed everything around AI and we shall explore all these points in detail, but let us begin with the basics first.

What is AI for Restaurants?

Artificial Intelligence is a computational model which is one of the branches of computer science that mimic human intelligence. That means AI, along with machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing, solves tedious tasks, such as processing large amounts of data, helping make informed decisions, and more. In restaurants, implementing AI can help restaurant managers automate various routine tasks, such as restaurant operations, reservations, handling inquiries, and more. AI helps restaurants create efficient workflows for a variety of restaurant activities, including inventory management, preparing food, strategizing food delivery, offering excellent customer services, and even helping in food waste management.

Significance of AI in Restaurants

AI is the need of the hour, irrespective of your business type and industry. For restaurants, it has a lot more to offer, and adopting AI technologies means you are keeping your restaurant future-ready. We have explored some of the top benefits of AI in restaurants. Let’s explore them;

Reduce Costs

Implementing AI into restaurants helps you save costs over operations. For example, restaurants can use AI technologies to automate various tasks, such as table booking, order processing, daily sales insights, and more. They consume a lot of time, resources, and effort, but AI can do it cost-effectively and without keeping your restaurant staff occupied.

Minimal or Zero Error

AI can help provide error-free service. For example, order processing in the restaurant is an error-prone zone in which an in-house server or human intelligence fails sometimes. But it can accurately process orders.

Order Customization

Customization indirectly increases customer engagement and profits per order. For example, with the help of AI, you can give more control to your customers. Your guests, while ordering food via your restaurant website, customize orders as per their requirements.

Help discover new customers

Artificial intelligence is crucial not just in automating day-to-day tasks but also can create effective restaurant marketing strategies by helping define customers’ types for particular foods.

Provide Excellent Customer Experience

Deploy AI in your restaurants, free up your team to let them do what they are good at. You may deploy restaurant staff to deliver the best customer experience.

Top Ways AI Transforming Restaurants

As we have explored the basics, let’s examine the core points of ‘how AI is shaping the restaurant sector. In simple words, these are the top use cases of AI in restaurants. We have divided the AI use cases in restaurants into four parts, including.

1. AI for Enhanced Customer Experience
2. AI Use Cases in Restaurant Operations
3. AI Uses Cases in the Front of the Restaurant Premises
4. AI Use Cases for Back of the Restaurants Premises

Let’s explore all these use cases in detail

AI for Enhanced Customer Experience

Providing enhanced customer experience is the prime reason for 55% of restaurant owners to use AI. However, that’s not limited to customers’ experience; the use of AI in restaurants can serve many purposes. Let us help you explore how AI provides enhanced customer experience.

Providing Highly Personalized Experience

One of the best use cases of Artificial intelligence in restaurants is “personalization.” From Ghost Kitchen, aka Cloud Kitchen, optimizing their cost structure to patrons getting personalized menu suggestions and smart loyalty programs. In other words, AI will fulfill every aspect of users that they have with your restaurants. Your guests love personalization when it comes to ordering food online, exploring the restaurant menu, table reservation, or simply exploring the menu while sitting at your on-premise restaurant. AI can be integrated into every restaurant process.

Help Guests Select Meals

Artificial intelligence can analyze the food preferences of customers by analyzing their past orders. The app will suggest food choices to users that they are likely to enjoy. Besides, an interactive digital menu offered by AI and a built-in virtual assistant can help customers choose their food after knowing everything about the meal. For example, they can explore the type of food with ingredients used in it and what nutritional value it has. It can help guests with tips for wine pairing, food choices, or mixed-matched dessert menus based on guests’ past preferences.

Providing Unique Menus for Each Customer

As we have already discussed, AI analyzes data, knows your customer’s preferences, and can easily present the menu they are likely to order. You do not have to create a static menu, similar for customers. Create a digital menu, and the AI tool will suggest a personalized menu to reach customers based on their past preferences.

Chatbots & Virtual Assistants

Did you know that 30% of restaurants worldwide use chatbots to provide automated customer experience?

With chatbots as a virtual assistant, restaurants can help customers get answers to their queries, book tables, schedule appointments, and even handle payroll. Keep your customers engaged, provide an instant solution for their queries, and stay available for them 24/7. Apart from this, while AI solves customers’ queries, you can free up time for their staff, allowing them to remain focused on the most complex tasks of the restaurants and plan on providing outstanding customer experience.

Personalized Marketing

AI can help you with personalized marketing. You can send promotional offers to each customer based on their preferences. How does this happen? AI can analyze customer data, know their past orders, food type and more. Based on that data, it can create targeted marketing campaigns. For example, the AI tool will help you send exclusive offers to your customers on their special occasions, such as anniversaries, birthdays, and others.

AI Use Cases in Restaurant Operations

AI can be a game changer to run your restaurants smoothly. Whether you want to manage your team, inventory, supply chain, kitchen, staff, or others, AI alone is the solution for all your unsolved queries. Let’s explore some of the top use cases of AI which we have analyzed.

Smart Inventory and Optimizer Supply Usages

AI with predictive analytics can effectively analyze the stock level. It can accurately predict future demand and current usage and ensure the quantity of products to be ordered. Apart from this, with AI, restaurant managers can solve stocks and overstock issues effectively.

Smart Kitchen

AI is pretty much effective for ensuring kitchen operations. It can streamline the way traditional restaurant kitchens function. If you are using restaurant kitchen management software, artificial intelligence can be integrated into it. Now, AI-driven systems can optimize ingredient usage, maintain food quality, and even reduce waste. More than that, it can enhance the efficiency of food preparation without keeping your chef irritated.

Predictive Maintenance

AI can help run restaurants smoothly without facing downtime. For example, predictive maintenance is a crucial term that monitors kitchen equipment to ensure they run smoothly. It can sense the potential failure even before it occurs. That means managers can get alerts from AI sensors and take preventive measures to ensure the smooth running of restaurants and kitchens.

Automating Recipe Management & Digitizing Coaching Cooks

AI is smart, and it turns everything smart, even if it is digitizing your kitchen or helping your kitchen staff with recipe management. AI can turn itself into coaching cooks to help your team use food ingredients in the right proportion to maintain food quality. With AI, minimize food errors, ensuring occurring scaling and descaling of ingredients used.

Staff Scheduling —Assisting Waitstaff

Implementing AI in restaurants or integrating it with your existing system gives you the power to create optimal staff schedules. It lets your restaurants face no shortage of staff while effectively managing labor costs during slow periods. Apart from staff scheduling, AI can assist waitstaff. For example, it can predict the pick hours and track refills of drinks, bread, and other food items. The staff gets updates for every inventory item so they can fill in as needed. The tool is effective in keeping your waitstaff occupied and providing a smooth dining experience to customers or patrons.

For the restaurant team, this means less time spent on routine tasks while allowing them to spend more on creativity and customer service. Your guests will benefit from consistent food quality and potentially faster service. If you provide a good dining experience, they will pay you back by promoting your restaurants among their friends and family —word of mouth marketing.

AI Uses Cases in the Front of the Restaurant Premises

AI is a comprehensive suite of technologies that helps you manage your resources from all perspectives. For example, you can use AI to manage the front of the restaurant’s house. For example, you have various tasks upfront, such as calls from customers and voice ordering, which you can effectively manage via AI tools. We have reviewed those use cases as well.

Answer Customers Call

You must be receiving hundreds of calls from customers. But, do you answer all of them? Of course, you may miss some of them. But AI can never give you an excuse for missing calls from customers as it can answer the calls of customers. You can use tools that can answer your customers with respect to food, timing, reservation, and more. Using the AI tool, you can turn 83% of customers positive about your results, as the same number of customers may be sworn off in case you missed attending calls.

Voice Ordering

Did you know 64% of adults are interested in using voice AI to order food while one-quarter of them are already using it?

People, especially the tech-savvy generation, effectively use AI voice tools for online searches. Apart from this, there are many people who prefer to use a voice-over keyboard or touchpad for writing messages and queries —they simply use voice to solve their queries. ‘Hey SIRI,’ ‘OK Google,’ ‘Alexa,’ Cortana, etc. are great examples of voice search. Restaurants can also use voice search tools to enable customers to order food using their voice commands. However, you need to ensure the tool is effective in helping your customers order their desired food.

AI Use Cases for Back of the Restaurants Premises

Artificial Intelligence is helping restaurants strategically manage the backend of their restaurants. With an effective restraints backend, you can improve your results, scale reach, target more customers, and increase sales. But how will AI help do all that? Here are a few use cases for you to explore.

Data-based Insights & Predictions

You run a restaurant, but do you keep a count of how many customers you serve offline and online? Do you remember which food was the most preferred by your customers? Maybe yes, if you have an effective account department and use the workforce to keep track of all. Or, you may be using online tools to manage the account and track the customers. But, they are error-prone. AI, on the other hand, helps you with data-based insights. For example, it can fetch user-based data and find the number of customers you serve, what they order, and their preferences. Based on the data, AI can predict things in a better way, helping you make better and more informed decisions.

Content (Text, Image, Video) Creation

If you have built a restaurant’s website or used social media platforms to promote restaurants, you must require a whole lot of content, images, and videos. Hiring marketing professionals is a good choice, but it’s a costly affair. If you are a startup, that’s going to be additional costs, but AI can help you save those costs without letting you cut the marketing activities. For example, using AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others, you can create effective content and make videos and images to use across platforms, including your website.

Bonus: Other AI Use Cases for Restaurants

AI is omnipresent and can help you do anything you need materially. We have explored the use cases of AI in restaurants for various purposes; now, let’s examine the other use cases of AI in restaurants. So, here we go.

Identifying Repeat Customers, Help Deliver Better Services

Innovation has a lot to offer to your restaurant business. We have discussed a lot about AI in restaurants for many purposes. Now, the other is that it can help you identify repeat customers so you can deliver customized and personalized services.

For example, using AI devices with facial recognition can help you recognize the customer when they visit your restaurant for a second time. Now, with the data, such as past orders, preferences, and others, you can perfectly anticipate their requirements and provide personalized services.

Reducing The Number of Unsatisfactory Orders

With AI, customers can get insights about the customer’s choices, food likes, and more. With AI, you can understand your customers’ choices, know their requirements, and deliver the best food they want. It will help you reduce the chances of unsatisfactory orders. AI can effectively analyze why your customers return food. Understanding the loopholes, such as food overcooked, wrong orders, and more. AI will analyze those issues and keep your team alert. Apart from this, AI tools integrated into your system can analyze the type of food that customers return more often.

Powering Food Preparation Robots

According to Statista, global market volume for food robotics is expected to reach USD 3.1 billion in 2024 while slated to reach $5.4 in 2030.

The data is for robots only, but imagine when they are powered by AI. AI robots can make things right in your favor. They can enhance productivity inside the kitchen or provide customer services. One of the great examples of AI robots is Flippy 2 from White Castle, which can help the restaurant manage culinary tasks, such as deep frying. It’s fully autonomous.

The Future of AI in Restaurants

Even though AI is not going to replace human staff in restaurants, the future restaurants are going to be completely AI-driven. From serving food to guests and cooking alongside chefs to assisting customers in booking tables, placing orders, and offering unique dining experiences to customers, AI will take over all aspects of restaurant functions.

The future restaurants would feature;

• AI Robots Serving Food to Customers
• AI as Robotic Chefs
• AI Tool to Guide Nutrition
• Augmented Reality Menu

AI in restaurants is not just a trend but a transformation shift that is changing every traditional way of serving customers, preparing food, and delivering food to customers’ doorsteps. No doubt, it’s still too early to predict everything about AI in restaurants; there are some exciting things happening around restaurants.

While you will have robots helping you serve food to your customers and prepare food, assisting chefs in the kitchen, AR with AI will help you bring the menu to life. You can have a lot more in the bucket to explore for AI in restaurants. So, begin with what current AI innovation has to offer and keep ready for a bright future for your restaurants.

Final Thoughts

AI in restaurants is evolving, and you can expect a transformational shift in a few years. We at Foodiv understand the significance of AI in restaurants, and hence, we are offering future-ready online food ordering systems to our clients. The system we provide is AI-integrated and helps you serve your customers online and offline efficiently. Connect with us today to understand how AI is bringing a transformational shift to the restaurant sector or if you want to understand the potential of AI for your food and beverages business. We help you make the best use of artificial intelligence and get the most out of it.