The restaurant industry has fully embraced the AI revolution…sort of.
Most national chains already use AI for everything — AI phone answering, automated restaurant marketing, delivery chatbots, smart mobile apps. But the independent operators and local joints that are the lifeblood of this industry got left out.
Until recently, indies couldn't afford this kind of technology. Fast advances in AI for restaurants are turning that around, and vendors like Owner now help independents catch up. Owner is an all-in-one restaurant operations platform with a growing set of AI-powered features built for smaller operations.
“Our mission is to help the Davids take on their Goliaths,” explains Owner Vice President of Partnerships Tina Glickman. “When you look at places like Domino’s, McDonald's, or Chipotle — they have these massive war chests. They have so much funding, and they have hundreds of engineers that have literally trained consumers on what to expect from a digital experience. The ‘mom and pops’ have never had that before.”
Owner is working to change that.
The Window of Opportunity
“There is a window of opportunity where we can use AI for restaurants to create advantages for small business operators who, before this day and age, didn't have these types of tools,” explains Tina. “Independent operators that are willing to embrace these AI tools can get a leg up in the battle against the hundreds of challenges they face every single day while running a restaurant.”
According to a recent article from Restaurant Dive, roughly a quarter of restaurants use AI. But among quick-service chains, that number jumps to 70%.
That’s a gap that Owner wants to close by making AI for restaurants more affordable, more accessible, and easier to use.
“We give local restaurants a world-class team that they would never be able to afford otherwise,” Tina tells us. “We are the SEO expert that keeps them ahead of the algorithm. We're the engineers building their five-star mobile app. We're the marketer that's always optimizing automations based on millions of data points.”
5 Ways Your Restaurant Can Seize an AI Advantage
The restaurants that move first gain an edge over the ones that wait. Here are a few ways that AI for restaurants can help.
1. Answer Your Phones With AI
“A restaurant's phone can be an absolute liability,” explains Tina. “Missed calls mean missed engagements and frustrated guests. An under-trained staff member answering a call — that's a liability. A busy lunch rush where the phone rings 40 times unanswered is a liability. A super-noisy, bustling restaurant, where you can’t hear what the person on the other end is saying — that's another liability.”
Then add the calls no one answers after you close. Every one costs you orders. With AI phone answering for restaurants, a chat agent picks up instantly, 24/7, and handles nearly any question your customers ask.
It takes orders and suggests add-ons or specials the customer might like. As Tina tells us, “We think about AI phone answering for restaurants as turning a huge pain point into a growth engine on autopilot.”
2. Optimize Your Online Visibility
“When we think about visibility, we think about front doors,” Tina explains. “Your website is your digital front door and it’s just as important as the front door to your actual brick and mortar. Your digital front door has to include all of the information, vibe, and feeling that someone would be able to capture by walking through the front door to your restaurant.”
So how can you maximize the visibility and vibe of your digital front door? Well, it’s actually not that simple. The algorithms that search engines like Google use to determine visibility are extremely complex.
And it’s not just that they’re too complex to be decoded by restaurant operators. They’re too complex to be decoded by human beings in general. This is where AI for restaurants becomes essential.
“Independent restaurant operators shouldn't have to be digital marketing experts. They shouldn't have to understand the 200 data points that Google looks at when it decides if and how it's going to push a business to the top of the search rankings,” Tina notes.
"That's one way that we take something off the operator's plate with AI,” Tina adds. “We leverage AI to ensure that our restaurants and their digital front doors (their websites and their Google Business Profile) are search engine optimized."
3. Expand Your Digital Footprint
AI is also changing how people search. It now lives inside tools like Google, Siri, and Alexa, and when someone asks for a restaurant, they may only see or hear the top result.
Showing up somewhere in a Google search no longer cuts it. Your website and your Google business profile need to be at the top of the list when people search for the best pizza place, burger joint, or bubble tea house in your town. Owner takes an AI-powered approach to this.
“Every time we launch a new customer's website, we use AI to cross-reference every single most-commonly-searched-for menu item that's associated with their concept and the actual menu items that they sell,” Tina explains.
“Then we leverage AI to create a unique page for every single one of those menu items with all the fundamentals that Google needs to see on a website. That helps us push that result up to the top of the search.”
Owner also uses AI tools to track how each page performs. That's how Tina knows the strategy works. She explains, “We can see how many clicks and views we’re getting from all of these pages and we actually see 40% of search volume comes from all of those automated pages that we've built with AI behind the scenes.”
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4. Launch a Mobile App
“A customer that actually downloads and orders through the mobile app will order with twice the frequency of someone that goes to the website,” Tina points out. This makes the mobile app one of your most powerful loyalty channels.
“I think of loyalty less as a program and more about the strategy you use to get to know your guests,” Tina explains. “This makes it possible to communicate with your guests in ways that encourage them to visit more often.”
A lot of the national chains like Starbucks and Domino’s win on the strength of their apps. This is not just because the apps work well, but because they use AI technology to collect customer data, personalize push notifications, and even tailor checkout.
Owner wants that same tech in the hands of independents. She explains, “We decided it was mission critical that every single restaurant move as quickly as possible to get that app live. We need to give guests the gift of convenience.”
5. Automate and Personalize Your Customer Outreach
Your AI phone answering, your website, and your app all capture valuable data. Use it well, and you can personalize how you reach your customers.
As Tina explains, “our system is built to ensure that with every single touchpoint, we are capturing the name of that guest, their phone number, and their email address. This gives us a 360 view of every single guest and every way that they've ever interacted with that restaurant.”
Put it to work, and the right AI for restaurants can build targeted, automated restaurant marketing. As Tina explains, “We use all of the guest information we’ve captured so that we can send the right message to the right person at the right time. For instance, we're not sending a vegan customer an email about the meat lover’s pizza. We're sending them an email about our new plant-based calzone.
“It's about relevant, thoughtful, targeted communications that make that guest feel known by a brand,” Tina explains. “And we all crave that. We all want to feel known by the companies that we choose to engage with. AI is enabling all of this incredible data collection so that we can focus on making our guests feel known, loved, and cherished.”
Stay Curious About What AI Can Do for Your Restaurant
AI for restaurants might even improve the human experience for your customers. As Tina sees it, “AI for restaurants is just smart automation. An AI tool is just a tool. A cook wouldn't be threatened by a better knife. It makes their job easier. A server wouldn't be threatened by a better POS solution. It makes their life easier.”
“AI is just another way to make the folks that do work in hospitality more efficient with their time,” Tina points out, “Letting the technology do all those rote tasks every day so that the operator, the chef, the server, the host can spend their time on talking to guests, understanding them, giving them a great hospitable experience, and providing them with the most excellent of food.”
So what can AI do for your restaurant? Tina says, “If you're not actively asking this question, then you’re missing out. So dig in and be curious.“
Start with a free, personal consultation with one of our in-house restaurant technology experts and we’ll work together to figure out what you need!
