![]() 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? ![]() AI can be a useful tool when you’re looking to recruit new staff to your team. It can help you craft a compelling and factual job description quickly and automatically based on the information you provide. What it can’t do so well is communicate the less tangible nuances of your culture: what your team is like, what energizes them, and how people experience working at your restaurant, for example. That requires some human input and oversight. As a recent report from Modern Restaurant Management puts it, the people applying for a job with you should be able to feel “the bustling energy of a fast-paced kitchen, the warmth of a family-owned establishment, or the innovation of a cutting-edge culinary concept.” These are also the kinds of qualities that inspire connection and loyalty among your staff. So what is it about your restaurant’s culture, standards and values that sets your business apart from the restaurant across the street? How can you make sure people feel that when they read your job description – and that this feeling carries over seamlessly when they come through your front door? ![]() Foodservice sustainability was a key theme to the recent National Restaurant Association Show – and the tools and systems on display promoted benefits well beyond the environment. According to a Nation’s Restaurant News report, highlights of the show supported restaurants’ efforts around waste management, operational efficiency and food safety. Think eco-friendly fryers that reduce frying time, use less oil and may reduce oil vapors; AI-supported tech that helps operators track their food consumption and waste in real time; and sensors connected to the Internet of Things that can inform staff with greater precision when food that has been sitting out needs to be discarded, or if it’s still safe to serve. ![]() Artificial intelligence is already proving its potential to help restaurants fine-tune their brands — largely by creating the kinds of experiences that specific guests crave. You may already be using AI algorithms to analyze guests’ order histories and preferences to provide targeted food recommendations, but the technology’s capabilities expand beyond that. Do you have guests who ask a lot of questions about your menu or otherwise need help landing on a dish? AI voice-enabled assistants can give guests information about a dish’s ingredients and nutritional value, as well as help guests select meals — easing the burden on staff and likely speeding ordering times. Upon a guest’s arrival at your restaurant, it can greet a repeat guest by name, remember their favorite table, and suggest menu items or specials they are apt to enjoy. Expect to see AI play a larger role in building the ambiance of restaurants too — by suggesting music and lighting based on your guest data, or offering immersive dining experiences through virtual or augmented reality. On the service side, an AI chatbot on your app or website can help you make your ordering more accurate and also respond to customer service enquiries at any hour of the day. When guests leave reviews, AI can screen their input and pull out key insights you can use to improve your experience. Some of AI’s benefits still feel futuristic, and the earliest adopters are bound to hit snags along the way, but it’s worth paying attention to how the technology is moving the needle on the experience and service a business provides. Consumer expectations are bound to shift as a result. ![]() We eat with our eyes – or at the very least, the images we see of a dish have more power to sway our ordering choices than the text descriptions we read. In fact, Grubhub found that including professional photos in your menu can increase your sales by 30 percent. Even if you don’t want to overload your menu with images, there are many places beyond your menu where images can drive sales – on your website, in app-based communications to guests, in social media posts. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s becoming easier for restaurants to generate accurate, quality images of menu items – all with just a series of text prompts. Two startups are making it possible for restaurants to do just this. Hackernoon reports that Lunchbox collaborated with OpenAI to launch a food photo generator, and SWIPEBY has a text-to-photo tool that generates food photos based on menu descriptions. It will likely take a few tries, but you may be able to create a close likeness of the profitable dishes you want to promote by simply describing their ingredients and appearance to these tools. ![]() 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. |
Subscribe to our newsletterArchives
July 2024
Categories
All
|