Super-Sized AI Opportunity
Is there a super-sized #AI opportunity for restaurants? Let's start with the #data. Take-out orders jumped during the first year of the pandemic - from 77% to 90% in 2020. Full-service restaurants saw an even bigger jump from 19% to 47%. The pace has dropped off, but old habits die hard.
With any big change comes an interesting business opportunity. For restaurants, that’s an increase in digitization and automation. Facing labor shortages and increased wage demand, the first wave is basic automation and hamburger-flipping robots (meet Flippy). Machines don’t call in sick, they rarely talk back, and don’t get tired at the end of a shift.
The path towards #datainsights becomes fairly obvious as firms build on a foundation of digital operations and app-based customer engagement. We saw Mcdonald's acquire Dynamic Yield (AI-based experience personalization) in 2019 and more recently Chipotle shared details on how they are using AI-powered kitchen management tools to improve the guest and employee experience.
So what could be to come? With increased demand and more digital consumers, we may soon see the following:
Virtual personalized ordering -- all level-one ordering will occur with a digital worker using voice-to-text modeling. Many drive-thrus are already offering this 'service' today, but soon there will be countless personalized bots who optimize their tone, language, and dialect to increase your order size.
Intelligent Order-Ahead -- there is a true "need for speed" in fast food, with 7-second wait times having up to a 3% impact on drive-thru revenue. The solution isn't just fully automated kitchens, it's predictive ordering using both local trend data in buying habits along with video monitoring of car traffic to capture car make/model and even license plates.
Autonomous delivery -- GrubHub and Uber Eats provide a great service, but rest assured we'll be seeing autonomous delivery vehicles and drones delivering more than humans in under 5 years. Look at Nuro, who received funding from Chipotle and is partnering with Domino's as an early innovator in the space. While there are many regulatory hurdles to get past, we're seeing significant inroads in autonomous driving which will pave the way for 24x7 happy meals soon enough.
Whether or not you are working in the restaurant or fast food industry, it would be smart to watch how McDonald's and other culinary innovators pave the way into our wallets (and stomachs). Leveraging the data you are required to use for operations (payments, order time, customer details) can gradually be used to provide faster service, higher revenue, and happier employees -- especially Flippy.
