Another newsletter about AI
SpotOn's Bryan Solar on his company's latest efforts. (Maybe Expedite should start a new column called ‘Stuff AI can do.’)
Artificial intelligence in restaurants is still a tricky proposition. There’s its utility (which is great) and the excitement about its perceived utility (also great), but also some healthy fear, nerves, and uncertainty about what this new artificially intelligent chapter will bring.
For example:
“We've done a bunch of polling of our customers and a bizarre number of them are terrified of AI,” Bryan Solar, chief product officer at point of sale provider SpotOn, told me recently.
One customer was even more direct, telling Solar, “You’ve got to keep that AI out of our restaurant.”
Except once the restaurant operator understood how AI would be used inside the product — in this case, SpotOn’s restaurant-centric point of sale system — they backtracked.
“Oh, that sounds great, actually,” the customer said, per Solar.
He chalks this up to operator education… and maybe Hollywood. “They had almost like a Skynet view,” he says, invoking the self-aware AI from last century’s Terminator movies. “Like it was going to automatically start cancelling reservations and cutting staff and doing all these things.”
AI is poised to change the way we do a lot of things.
It’s new, it’s unknown, and even the biggest companies in the space are still working out the kinks. At the same time, it’s become the fastest-adopted technology in history, which can lead to plenty of FOMO.
According to data from a recent Deloitte survey, eight in 10 restaurant execs plan to invest in AI this year. That number, while promising for the executive set, is not necessarily indicative of interest among America’s independent restaurants. Practically, they might need a little more hand-holding.
The National Restaurant Association’s most recent data — pulled from surveys conducted before Deloitte’s — found 28 percent of operators planned to invest in integrating AI into their business this year. That’s a big discrepancy.
But maybe not! The same report — the same graph in the same report — shows over half of operators plan to invest in digital marketing or loyalty and rewards programs or back-office tech, point of sale systems, workforce management software… all practical, useful technologies currently benefitting from AI infusions.
I asked Solar, who previously worked with restaurants at Google and Square, for an update on SpotOn’s latest AI-enhanced features. We also talked about realistic implications of artificial intelligence for restaurants now, what they might expect to come next, and how to make this all a little less scary.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Expedite: We’re talking because SpotOn pitched me on a new feature, called ‘pick for you’ for orders placed online.
Bryan Solar, SpotOn: “We actually started two years ago with the feature called ‘pick for you’ that could upsell something, but it was always the same thing. Last year, we started going harder on using AI in our data.