3 Ingredients to Drive AI Adoption in Restaurants

By Clinton Anderson|Jul 19, 2024|3:27 pm CDT

AI’s impact is undeniable. Restaurants and hospitality companies must embrace AI and utilize it to increase efficiency, increase profitability, and improve the dining experience. The challenge for many is knowing where to start. 

AI forecasting is an excellent jumping off point and a quick win for restaurant operators. AI-powered forecasting analyzes historical data and accounts for seasonal and situational factors to derive an optimal shift schedule. It can tell you how many servers to staff on a typical Wednesday or how many bar staff you need on Cinco de Mayo. It enables restaurant management to staff the precise team they need to meet demand, thereby lowering cost due to overscheduling and protecting the dining experience from an understaffed shift.

Doesn’t that sound fantastic? 

Maybe not if you’re a restaurant manager that doesn’t believe in the technology, doesn’t understand the technology, or doesn’t trust the technology. If your managers aren’t on board, your investment in AI will go underutilized and won’t reach its full potential. To fully realize the ROI of AI, leadership must provide support when rolling out AI in their restaurants. In this blog, we’ll review the three most important ingredients to AI adoption in restaurants. 

Why Restaurant Managers May Resist Adopting AI Forecasting

With any new technology there’s always a bell curve, from early adopters to reluctant, feet-draggers. 

You can understand why a seasoned restaurant manager may be reluctant to trust an AI forecasting tool after spending their career forecasting on their own. It’s not stubborn pride. It’s a lifetime of experience.

Think about it like most people’s reluctance to get in a vehicle that drives itself. Even those that are open to the idea might reach for the wheel when approaching a sharp turn, instinctually push the brake when approaching a stop, or otherwise try to reestablish control.

If restaurant operators are given an AI forecasting solution by ownership and simply told to trust it, when a dinner rush starts, those same brake tapping instincts can take over.

3 Ways to Drive Adoption of AI Among Restaurant Managers

To encourage adoption of AI forecasting, implement these three elements:

Open Communication: It’s important to frame the adoption program as seeking manager buy-in on the solution. You want them to be part of the team rather than commanding them to use the new tool. To do that, you need to establish open communication and allow their voices to be heard.

Issue feedback surveys to pilot locations before and after, so you can showcase the improvements to managers. Try to understand their expectations before training, and their reactions after exposure. This has several important benefits:

• Identifies those managers who are most resistant to its use
• Allows an opportunity for management to suggest new opportunities for process improvements
• Helps find common points of confusion that can be clarified in training
• Involves management in the conversation

Prove Efficacy with Data: AI forecasting does its calculations behind the scenes. Restaurant managers simply receive the output — a supposedly optimized schedule for the coming week. It is natural to be skeptical of a tool that doesn’t explain how it reached its conclusions.

So, prove it. Prove the efficacy of the solution with data. Show the broader team the data from pilot locations before implementing AI forecasting and after, and stand by the results. Be sure to share the kinds of data management is used to seeing. If the data points are too esoteric, the value will not resonate.

If your management team sees a 10% reduction in labor costs due to an optimized shift. If they see that 98% of the time, the forecast is accurate, you will build trust. 

Management Adopts a QA Role: The great fear of AI, and you see this repeated in one form or another in nearly all conversations around it, is that the AI will replace humans. This fear underpins some of the reluctance and skepticism towards adoption.

Ease the concerns of your team by reframing AI forecasting as a tool to be wielded by managers that still requires their expertise and judgment. An AI forecasting tool may be accurate nearly every time, but there could be instances where the AI does not factor in – or overcompensates for – a relevant variable. Managers will gain a greater sense of control if they know that their hours saved forecasting are replaced by minutes of applying their expertise to catch the infrequent mistake.

This keeps managers in the driver’s seat and AI as a highly-effective co-pilot, rather than the other way around.

The Secret Ingredient is Patience

There is an understandable impulse to try and rush a new technology onto the team. Ownership invested valuable resources in the solution with the promise that it would reduce costs or drive efficiency. It is natural to want to see a return as soon as possible.

The secret ingredient is patience. With consistent effort to encourage adoption, managers will come along in time. Prove the value of the solution, build trust, and before long AI will become a seamless aspect of the role.