10 Innovative Ways to Leverage AI in Restaurants in 2025
restaurants,
AI’s influence has expanded beyond tech, transforming how restaurants manage operations, enhance diner experience, and streamline decision-making.
As a restaurant owner, learning how to leverage AI can be the ingredient you need to spearhead growth and give yourself an edge over the competition.
Confused over where to start?
Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered.
This article will highlight ten ways to leverage AI in restaurants alongside case studies and critical deployment tools.
So, let's get right to it.
Further Reading
- Discover how iovox helped Mitchel & Butlers pick up 27,000 phone bookings per week.
- Learn how iovox helped Pizza Express increase its bookings by 42%.
This Article Contains
- 10 Game-Changing Ways to Use AI in Restaurants
- How AI Helped 2 Restaurants Streamline Operations (Case Studies)
10 Game-Changing Ways to Use AI in Restaurants
If you’re looking to deploy AI in your restaurant, consider these ten applications:
Streamlining Reservations and Table Management
Most restaurants get bookings over the telephone, which isn’t the most efficient, especially during peak times.
Unanswered calls and booking mishaps can lead to angry guests and reputational damage if they happen too often.
Fortunately, platforms like Zonal and ResDiary go a long way in helping you avoid these situations.
However, they’re often not enough.
That’s where iovox comes in.
Our AI solution is perfect for all your phone-based services. Whether you need voicemail summarization, attribution, or advanced call tracking, iovox can help you streamline your restaurant operations.
For instance, we helped Mitchell and Butlers take 27,000 phone bookings per week by integrating our AI technology with Zonal’s LiveRes booking solution.
Here’s how the system works:
- An interactive voice answers the phone and captures booking details like date, time, party size, etc.
- The AI checks real-time availability and offers alternative slots if there are no open tables at the requested time.
- The AI sends SMS confirmations for each booking.
(Alternatively, the system can handle reservations through key presses or SMS.)
And here’s the kicker: we provide 24/7 service at a low flat monthly fee per restaurant, eliminating per-booking commission fees.
Voicemail Summarizations to Respond Faster
Restaurants are often very busy during peak hours and sometimes short on staff, leaving their reservation calls unanswered.
Voicemail automation systems are crucial in these situations as they record the diner's information and allow the restaurant to either call back or make a reservation on their behalf.
This helps you, as a restaurant owner, reduce no-shows and book more tables.
So, how does iovox help here?
iovox allows you to either automatically book the table in response to a customer’s message or summarize the voicemail for a quick overview of their needs, helping you respond immediately (without stopping and listening to the call).
And when you break the numbers down, this simple change can save you thousands of dollars weekly.
For example, if your average booking is worth $80 in revenue and you convert just 15 more voicemails a week, you’ll earn $1200 more that week.
Automating Inventory Control
It’s no secret that an inventory shortage can be especially bad for restaurants. Not only does it raise food safety concerns, but you’re also running the risk of ruining the guest experience.
However, inventory management isn’t easy, especially if you run a restaurant chain. Keeping track of multiple ingredients, suppliers, and locations requires a lot of time and resources.
Fortunately, modern AI algorithms can analyze the current inventory levels and the required menu items to provide real-time data for inventory management, such as stock levels and materials needed to run restaurant operations. This ensures that the food industry never comes to a standstill.
Deploying Virtual Assistants to Reduce Staff Workload
Running a restaurant is no easy task.
Managing everything from food preparation to staffing to customer demand can be extremely time-consuming. And most restaurant owners don’t have that luxury.
The solution? An AI assistant.
A virtual assistant can handle a multitude of tasks, such as customer inquiries, reservations, and other repetitive tasks, for a fraction of the cost. This allows you and your employees to focus on what matters most.
For example, iovox can understand contextual nuances, allowing it to handle customers and their bookings and inquiries.
The platform also provides insights, enabling you to understand which parts of your restaurant business are performing well and which areas need improvement, for example, which marketing channels are bringing in the most diners.
Providing a Personalized Experience Based on Food Preferences
Predictive analytics is an AI field that allows the system to analyze customer engagement, past orders, and other patterns to create a personalized dining experience.
This helps you optimize the ordering process and can play a huge role in increasing guest satisfaction and sales.
For example, Panera Bread — a fast-casual restaurant in the USA - utilizes predictive analytics to gather data on customer service, customer feedback, and order history to maintain customer preference and ensure the best-selling items are never out of stock.
Developing Loyalty Programs for Customer Retention
It’s well-known that loyalty programs are one of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction and retention. In fact, implementing loyalty programs can boost customer loyalty and increase retention rates by up to 25%.
Using iovox’s advanced call tracking, you can track customer data and provide incentives to repeat customers in the form of rewards, points, or exclusive memberships.
You can also leverage our integration with automated table booking systems to assign high-profit customers with their favorite table anytime or on short notice.
Optimizing Finances for Restaurants
Integrating AI into restaurant systems can also help optimize financial performance. Let’s examine a few ways AI tools can help here.
- Forecasts: Predictive analytics utilizes all available data to optimize staffing and revenue management. For example, AI can prompt you to make seasonal hires for historically busy months.
- Bookkeeping: AI can help restaurant managers handle and compile their financial sheets with real-time data. This gives the restaurant precise data on various aspects such as revenue, loss, etc.
- Optimizing the Menu: AI can analyze all available data and spot trends related to best-selling and underselling dishes. Restaurants can use this data to optimize their menus and save money.
Maintaining Quality and Food Safety
Computer vision is AI tech that allows computers to see in real-time. These systems analyze visual data to look for irregularities and understand patterns.
This can be used to check for ingredients in the food, spot signs of spoilage, automate inspections, and maintain consistency in the food preparation by analyzing the exact number of ingredients and method of cooking.
Take Outback Steakhouse. Their Portland location has implemented restaurant AI like computer vision to monitor tables and customer behavior. This allows them to analyze table wait times, staff movement, and customer interaction.
Predictive Analytics to Organize Staffing
QSR (Quick Service Restaurants) have adopted AI tech to organize employees into shifts based on busy days and those with less footfall. This allows the restaurant to utilize the workforce more efficiently and productively, allowing it to scale its operations.
Optimizing Marketing Activities
Restaurants are using AI tech to analyze customer orders and patterns to provide hyper-specific ads based on recent purchases or interests.
Take iovox’s conversational AI.
It can analyze call data to highlight key insights into market trends or competitors. This data can help you optimize your marketing strategies and messaging to maximize bookings.
Additionally, iovox can help with marketing attribution, helping you understand your most profitable channels and increase spending there.
Generative AI can also help here. With the right AI prompt, you can quickly generate the exact marketing content you need to draw more guests in.
How AI Helped 2 Restaurants Streamline Operations (Case Studies)
Here are two examples of AI being a game-changer for restaurants:
Mitchells & Butlers
Understanding how phone bookings can help you boost revenue and profits is crucial for offline businesses like restaurants.
Statistically, 65% of calls in the hospitality industry go unanswered, and 40% of the unanswered calls can be converted to revenue by using the right restaurant technology and strategies.
Case Study
Problem: Mitchells & Butlers was experiencing issues with its phone booking system due to staff unavailability during peak business hours.
Solution: With the iovox-powered LiveRes system, Mitchells & Butlers sites were able to automate their booking around the clock, which resulted in an additional 128 bookings a month per site. This increased their revenue exponentially, with over 27,000 bookings per week.
Pizza Express
Call attribution allows businesses to assign a specific number to certain locations and marketing channels. This allows big franchises to handle bookings from multiple locations easily.
This allows the AI system to analyze the call’s origin, which provides the restaurant management with enough information about which location is performing well.
Case Study
Problem: Pizza Express has over 450 locations across the UK and Ireland. Additionally, the staff did not have enough time to handle calls during peak hours.
Solution: By integrating iovox into their system, Pizza Express was able to connect all its locations, allowing them to manage bookings from multiple locations 24 hours a day.
Wrapping Up
It’s no surprise that there’s been a rapid increase in the use of AI tools across the restaurant industry. From M&B to Pizza Express, restaurant operators all over have benefited from solutions like iovox to increase bookings and sales.
It doesn’t matter if you run restaurant chains or independent restaurants; you can now seriously benefit from utilizing AI in your daily operations
So, why not get started yourself?
Visit the iovox website for pricing information and more.
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