Some Examples of A.I. in the Restaurant Industry

The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post

• All business owners should pay attention to how the restaurant industry is using A.I., because many of its use cases involve interaction between human customers and artificial intelligence. 
• Touch screens that automatically communicate orders to kitchens are one of the more widespread examples of A.I.
• Conversational computing A.I. in drive-thrus is another significant potential application. 
• Another interesting example is Denny’s server robot that can deliver food to tables, announcing “FOOD IS HERE” upon serving the comestibles. 
• As of right now (that being, the time of the writing of this article), it is unknown just how much of this A.I. will stay in the restaurant industry. Perhaps the most significant metric that business owners ought to concern themselves with is whether the customers positively respond to the A.I., or not. 


Customer Response Is Everything

In the fourth bullet point of the Key Takeaways section above is hyperlink-embedded text to a New York Times article. In that article is a mention of a pre-publication and under-review–that is, at the time of the article’s publishing–research paper about how humans prefer human chefs to robot chefs because they feel that the humans make the food “with love”. 

That preference, however, is not present in all cases, as the paper shows. In fact, if the robot does something as simple as display text in a conversation with humans, then the preference fades. 

The implication here is that mere interaction with the cook, human or no, is what matters to the “my food was made with love” perception, rather than the humanity or lack of humanity of the cook.

The A.I.-to-Human Ratio Will Likely Be Key

Will the findings in the paper mentioned in the section above extend to things like A.I. drive-thrus and cashiers? 

That is an important question, because even in restaurants experimenting with implementing A.I. tray-carriers, there are usually some humans present. 

If these were to be mostly A.I. restaurants, with just a handful of human employees, then we will see the limits of whether customers feel as if their dining experience was forged with emotion. 

A Noteworthy Challenge Facing A.I. in Restaurants

A recurring reminder in the GO AI blog is that what business owners must understand about A.I. is that it lacks some pretty fundamental features of common sense that the vast majority of humans possess.

A.I.’s fundamental lack of such common sense can be seen in many examples of A.I. snafus.

For instance, a human drive-thru worker will readily recognize that two people ordering hundreds of hamburgers would only occur in the rarest of circumstances. Whereas A.I. might make that mistake, because unlike a human, A.I. does not eat food. It does not even have an appetite. 

The basic fact that human experience involves consuming food for energy, which gives one a sense of what constitutes a reasonable amount of hamburgers for two people to order. 

Of course, there are some back-to-the-drawing-board operations that can iron out those kinks. But taking care of one common-sense issue does not take care of all of them. 

Extend the potential problems outward to other factors, such as human taste. Most human beings have no interest in squirting ketchup in their French onion soup, and so a human chef will automatically know to just not do that, and if given such a request would likely question whether a miscommunication was occurring. 

Even if developers manage to program the A.I. to not squirt ketchup in French onion soup, there are still so many unknown snafus that real-world errors that restaurant owners will share the negative results of, in a public trial-and-error. 

About the GO AI Blog

Guardian Owl Digital is a digital-marketing company that offers A.I. services through its initiative GO AI, which this blog is part of. 

GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole. 

Of course, so many things–pretty much everything, really–can cause trends or even significant overhaul-level changes in the business world. For example, an article about government regulations on A.I. is relevant because such regulations directly affect the business world. 

So, coverage of A.I.’s wide-ranging influence can indeed be relevant, as what wider-world changes A.I. influences can, in a roundabout way, likely affect businesses. 

Other Great GO AI Blog Posts

On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles: 

• For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
• IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
• Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
• How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners? 
• The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)