Adora POS Teams with ConverseNow for Voice AI Ordering

Scheduling the right number of staff for each shift enhances operational efficiency and productivity, leading to smoother operations, happier employees, and more satisfied customers. Voice-based AI ordering for drive-thru’s is improving order accuracy and speed of service, promoting consistent upselling and increasing restaurant productivity. In addition, AI-driven technology facilitates predictive analytics and data-driven decision-making, enabling restaurants to optimize inventory management and staffing levels.

The technology helps restaurants understand customer preferences across different demographics, track their interactions, and gain insights that enable managers to make informed decisions about operations, marketing, and customer service enhancements. Optimized menus for an enhanced dining experience and better profitability
AI can also provide valuable menu recommendations by leveraging data from similar establishments, helping them optimize their offerings. By analyzing restaurant data and market trends, AI can identify popular and profitable dishes, allowing operators to optimize their menus, improve satisfaction, and encourage repeat business. MARA AI is a review management solution that leverages artificial intelligence to streamline the process of responding to and analyzing customer feedback. This cutting-edge tool generates personalized, human-like responses across multiple review platforms, including Google, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor. By automating this time-consuming task, MARA AI enables restaurants to maintain a high response rate, demonstrating attentiveness to customer feedback and improving overall online reputation.

Taco Bell Embraces AI Drive-Thrus, Aiming for Increased Restaurant Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction

The fast-food giant ended its partnership with IBM earlier this year after widespread customer complaints and viral social media posts highlighting the system’s flaws, including inaccurate orders and unusual food combinations. Furthermore, AI’s role in employee scheduling and task management helps align staffing levels with customer demand, enhancing service quality while optimizing labor costs. On the operational side, AI technologies are instrumental in streamlining inventory management, reducing waste and forecasting demand with greater accuracy.

By optimizing inventory levels, reducing waste, and streamlining logistics, QSCC aims to achieve significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. In today’s bustling restaurant industry, where every detail matters, technology has become an indispensable tool – especially in hiring and staffing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the recruitment process, offering a new level of efficiency chatbot for restaurants and automation. However, as restaurants embrace this, it’s crucial to maintain a balance between technological advancement and human interaction, ensuring that the essence of hospitality isn’t lost in the digital shuffle. OpenTable restaurants will be able to request an integration with PolyAI via its Integration Marketplace, which powers 150+ integrations among the most widely used restaurant software.

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In addition to the introduction of Gemini this year, they’ve also developed a range of AI features that will be integrated into standard Google searches. With Google committing to the AI project, the technology is likely to advance quickly and will present significant opportunities for business owners who are able to get ahead of the curve. Wendy’s says the approach has been thorough, taking into account customer and employee feedback, as well as accuracy and speed rates of the AI-enabled orders. As the pilot advanced, Wendy’s made tweaks to the AI’s voice-ordering tone to make it sound affable. AI is reshaping how restaurants operate and redefining the guest experience.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is an astounding technology that is continuously and exponentially evolving.
• More recently, PYMNTS spoke with James Roedding, head of product and data science at Rewards Network, about efforts by restaurants to use AI to update their online content, synthesize reviews, and improve analytics functions.
• Early adopters found that consumers had some concerns about privacy and security.
• AI-driven menus or suggestions from their server can direct diners toward popular and well-liked items they will most likely enjoy and toward higher-margin items, streamlining the experience and saving servers time.
• Looks like a social experiment to test the public’s intuition on AI generated content.
• CEO Kirk Tanner initially stated that the $20 million investment in these boards would allow for price adjustments based on demand, similar to Uber’s surge pricing model.

Taco Bell’s strategic utilization of technology has contributed in a big way to its recognition and marketing impact in recent years. Its digital channel witnessed a growth rate of nearly 35 percent last year, attributed in part to the deployment of in-store kiosks. Thousands of its restaurants have also employed “recommended ordering,” an advanced system that predicts and suggests optimal quantities for each product, enabling restaurant general managers to make informed inventory decisions. Additionally, the company assures that human employees will remain an integral part of the drive-thru experience, ready to assist if the AI encounters difficulties understanding an order. This initiative comes on the heels of McDonald’s highly publicized, and ultimately unsuccessful, foray into AI drive-thrus.

AI can play a pivotal role in creating compelling job ads for restaurants, utilizing the details provided by employers. However, the effectiveness relies heavily on the accuracy and relevance of the information provided. Just like in the kitchen, where the quality of the dish depends on the ingredients, AI-generated job ads need human oversight to ensure authenticity.

Surface Actionable Data and Insights

While this approach can streamlines certain aspects of hiring, human oversight ensures fairness, equity, and effectiveness in candidate selection. An AI-native WFM platform can easily and efficiently create an optimized labor plan, greatly reducing managers’ scheduling and staffing woes. True labor optimization aligns schedules with workers’ skills, permissions, and preferences, as well as projected demand and staff availability. It gets granular, which is precisely why restaurants need to support their labor experience gatekeepers with the proper technology – that way, they can achieve that granularity with minimal administrative headaches. North America-based fondue restaurant Melting Pot is an early adopter in leveraging this partnership. With PolyAI voice assistants rolling out to locations in Indiana, New Jersey and New York and many other restaurants in the implementation stage, the appeal of quick scale is evident.

She  has held a number of senior executive positions including CEO, President, and EVP with market research firms, and has managed seven of the top ten QSR chains’ national mystery shopping programs, including McDonald’s. Ovation, a guest experience platform for multi-unit restaurants, has launched Goals, an AI-driven operational improvement tool designed to automate change for restaurants. Goals does the analysis for brands by telling them what’s going on in their locations and how to solve problems, said Renee Curtis, senior product manager at Ovation. When we talk about the “restaurant of the future,” labor compliance isn’t exactly the flashiest or most exciting topic to include—certainly not when juxtaposed with salad-making robots and personalized digital menus.

Chief Marketing Officer Mike Mayo said restaurants are losing money on phone orders because they are understaffed and can’t take calls during peak hours. The company’s text-to-order solution can increase revenue by 37% because the bots are taking every call. While these technological advancements hold promise for improving efficiency and customer experience, the QSR industry faces several challenges in implementing and scaling these solutions. Integrating new technologies into existing systems can be complex and require significant investment in infrastructure and training.

ConverseNow Acquires Valyant AI, Consolidating the Drive Towards Voice AI Drive-Thru Restaurant Technology

The other areas where we are deploying AI is when you think about suggestive selling. As part of our order-taking experience, we want to make sure any products we offer the customer make sense not just with the order they’ve made but to them as a consumer generally. Drive-thrus are an area of the business that everyone has been trying to figure out, across the industry, to make it better for consumers. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. As we embarked upon our partnership with Google Cloud, we talked quite a bit about areas of innovation, and we came to the conclusion that this is a tough problem to solve and there’s a lot of opportunity to make the drive-thru opportunity better.

CEO Will Clem said the company paused for over a year to upgrade the software. Previously, a single remote cashier could only take orders for one restaurant. The upgraded software, which debuted at the show’s “Startup Alley” section, allows one remote cashier to take orders for multiple restaurants. On the other hand, Mukhin used the generative platform Midjourney to reimagine Bocuse’s iconic recipes, such as his signature truffle V.G.E soup.

Roedding noted that another unique feature of the Rewards Network platform that measures the interaction between restaurant and member is the verified review capability. Only members that have actually dined at participating restaurant can leave a review, which gives the establishment real insight into what they are doing well and what can be improved. “More and more, you are seeing more digital adoption across all customer groups,” he told PYMNTS as part ChatGPT of the “What’s Next in Payments” series on how various companies have shaped and refined their online efforts. For quick-serve restaurants (QSR), understanding and monitoring these shifts in consumer sentiment in different demographics is key to meeting the expectations of a diverse customer base. While 33 percent of respondents aged reported “not liking the idea of it,” a substantial 54 percent of respondents 45 and above didn’t like the idea of it.

McDonald’s drive-thru AI failures circulated on TikTok last year after several videos purported to show the system adding erroneous items like butter packets or multiplying how many items were ordered. Fast-food chains have taken an immense interest in integrating generative AI into their systems in recent years. Along with McDonald’s, a range of other companies including Wendy’s, Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr, and Del Taco all use AI technology at their drive-thrus. Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell and KFC, announced earlier this year that it was instituting an “AI-first mentality” in its fast-food restaurants. Goals was built to address the challenges restaurants face in translating data into actionable steps. Most feedback solutions generate data, but restaurant leaders often struggle with the time and effort required to decide what to do with that information.

However, the company has not yet released specific data to support these claims. But with so much changing at such a rapid pace, it can be difficult for restaurant operators to keep up with the latest trends. Here are some of the key ways technological innovations are revolutionizing restaurant operations. PizzaBox AI, a revolutionary new marketing and sales platform, has officially launched to help independent and small-to-medium (SMB) pizza restaurants save money, boost their online presence and generate new online orders on autopilot. Cognizant has been selected by Dine Brands Global to assist in the creation of its A.I.

• Overstaffing increases labor costs while understaffing can negatively impact customer experience.
• She covers global telecom markets, operator revenue strategies and emerging business areas, and heads thought leadership development in areas relating to CSPs, MNOs, MVNOs, MVNEs and cable.
• In addition to drive-thru orders, some companies have started to explore how generative AI could be used to develop digital chatbots on their apps or utilize image-recognition to determine wait times.
• This cutting-edge solution operates independently during the initial order process, only transferring control to human staff when encountering complex orders.

The technology is faster, more accurate and more consistent than human employees, he said, allowing restaurants to process orders quicker and yield higher revenue. The technology can help employees improve customer satisfaction, cook food to a brand’s standards and accurately refill inventory, executives say. Looking ahead, Roedding said, Rewards Network will be ramping up its efforts to enable user-generated content, as customers promote restaurants and restaurant owners can update their online content with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). While companies have touted AI as the future of the fast-food industry, these technologies have also resulted in viral videos and media coverage documenting when they get orders wrong.

Although many of these robotic projects are in developmental stages, a new automated beverage dispenser may be a nearer-term application that could be seen at quick-service restaurants in the near future. Miso Robotics is developing an automated beverage dispenser that will integrate with the POS system, automatically pour drinks based on specifications, and slot beverages according to order time. Today, robotics are already being implemented in many casual or fast casual dining formats as food runners. Autonomous robots navigate around the restaurant and deliver trays to designated tables, freeing up staff for other customer-facing activities.

The two companies developed and deployed the technology during the test period to “determine if an automated voice ordering solution could simplify operations for crew and create a faster, improved experience for our fans.” The partnership with Wobot enables Interface to offer QSRs and retailers a simpler way to make data-driven operational decisions without the complexities of a traditional data analytics solution. Wobot’s no-code workflow configuration capabilities, AI-enabled checklists to align with industry best practices, and real-time email and Microsoft Teams notifications will help customers accelerate time to value. A growing number of restaurant operators are deploying AI ordering technology for their phone and drive-thru systems, Ben Bellettini, senior vice president of restaurant sales at SoundHound, wrote in an email. Members earn rewards at airline, hotel and other loyalty programs with each dollar they spend at the participating restaurants.

The company believes it can solve throughput and labor shortages for quick-service burger joints, especially chains with large digital and drive-thru businesses. The company recently opened its first North American showroom in Midtown Manhattan. Aniai said they are ChatGPT App working with “several notable” North American fast-food brands. In South Korea, one of the company’s largest customers is burger franchise Lotteria, which has 1,300 locations. Lotteria was at the show using the Alpha Grill to make its signature bulgogi burgers.