Running a busy restaurant means – excuse the pun – keeping several plates spinning. It’s a huge challenge. But, nowadays, AI-powered tools can take a lot of the work off your plate. These tools help with employee training, front-of-house operations, and back-of-house operations.
In this article, you’ll learn the benefits of AI for your restaurant and 4 of the best AI-powered tools out there.
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Training your staff is the best way to ensure quality of service, customer satisfaction, and compliance with local regulations. It’s also a great way to reduce staff turnover. Training your staff is a net positive for your restaurant.
But—and it’s a big but—some obstacles stop many restaurants from training their employees. First, restaurant work is busy. With a to-do list as long as your arm, it can be hard to prioritize training. You might not physically have the time to create training materials and run training sessions. This is the reality of restaurant work: The frantic pace of the restaurant industry doesn't leave much time for training.
Second, the turnover rate in food and hospitality is around 70% per year in the US. It’s understandable why some restaurant owners might be reluctant to spend time and money on training when the staff they train might not stick around.
But this is the wrong way around. People want to progress in their careers. They want to learn skills and develop both personally and professionally. Because people understand the value of training, they’re happier to work at a place with a proper training program. A well-thought-out training program helps you reduce staff turnover and keep hold of your high performers.
Luckily, these two challenges aren’t insurmountable. AI-powered learning platforms take the hassle out of staff training.
eduMe is the leading AI-powered learning platform for restaurant teams. Its mobile-optimized and easy-to-digest lessons are perfect for frontline employees. They can complete training wherever and whenever they want.
With eduMe, you get:
Smooth blended learning. A mix of face-to-face and digital training works best for restaurant staff. Your staff gets to learn in a real environment, using the tools of the trade and learning from experienced colleagues. They also get digital materials to learn from at their own pace. With eduMe, employees can access digital materials easily. eduMe’s AI-powered feature suite also allows you to transform and repurpose existing training in moments—creating interactive lessons from the PDFs or documents you might already have.
Take the materials you use face-to-face, drop them into eduMe’s converter, and voilà, the AI turns that into a digital, interactive lesson.
For Jason Trail, the training and development manager at McCoy’s Building Supply, the benefit of this feature is clear: “We like eduMe AI because we can take documents we were using, pop them in [the pdf converter], and generate a course really quickly. We can get a course out quickly to everybody in a matter of minutes versus days or weeks.”
Fast content creation. eduMe AI helps you build content from scratch in seconds so you can respond to your staff's needs quickly. Not having enough time to make materials (or only having out-of-date materials) is no longer an obstacle to giving your staff continuous learning.
Personalized learning. What’s the best way to get staff to engage with training materials? By giving them specific content that’s relevant to them and their jobs. eduMe AI does this automatically. It tracks your employee’s performance, adapting the training content to their individual needs. The AI identifies the skills gaps in your workforce and recommends training content to fill them.
Auto-translated content. Restaurant staff come from diverse cultures and backgrounds. They should be able to access training content in the language they know best. eduMe AI allows employees to choose their preferred language so no one misses out, saving its restaurant clients up to $60,000 on manual localization efforts.
G2 rating: 4.7/5
Capterra rating: 4.7/5
How do you give guests the best possible experience while building relationships that lead to repeat customers? Through guest management. Unfortunately, effective guest management takes a lot of work.
Guest management is:
If you can get this right, you increase customer satisfaction and grow revenue. But it’s a long list. And a lot of work for your staff to do.
So why not let AI do most of it for you?
SevenRooms is a comprehensive guest management tool designed to give guests a fantastic experience. With its front-of-house features, you can manage reservations, seatings, and waitlists. You can also welcome and recognize your repeat customers because of the in-depth profiles SevenRooms automatically builds.
The profiles SevenRooms builds are game-changers. They track customer preferences, order history, and special occasions. For example, the AI will notice when a repeat customer makes a reservation on their birthday. And it’ll upsell a birthday cake.
SevenRooms automates your marketing using this data. Advanced segmentation features based on preferences, behavior, and history allow you to optimize your marketing campaigns.
You could do all of this manually. But it would take forever. SevenRooms’ AI will do it for you automatically.
G2 rating: 4.7/5
Capterra rating: 4.4/5
Food waste leads to a lot of money going down the drain. AI can help you reduce waste and costs by managing inventory—one restaurant reduced costs by 20%.
AI-powered inventory management analyzes history, customer trends, seasonality, and special events to ensure you order the right amount of ingredients. The algorithms predict what you’ll need and in what quantities so you never over or understock supplies.
But what about the food you’ve already bought? Well, AI monitors this, too. In real-time, you know when something is running low or when something is piling up. Using methods like First-In, First-Out, and shelf-life prediction helps you keep track of the freshness of ingredients.
AI inventory management directly affects your bottom line. You reduce costs and increase profits.
Restroworks is one of the leading restaurant management tools. It has some advanced features to help you reduce waste, create profitable recipes, and improve supply chain efficiency. Restroworks does this with:
G2 rating: 4.6/5
Capterra rating: 4.7/.5
Note: Restroworks is a fantastic tool for back-of-house operations. But if you’re a small business, it’s probably overkill. If you run a smaller restaurant, take a look at MarketMan.
Balancing labor costs with having enough staff to serve customers is like walking a tightrope. You're always one step away from having more staff than you need or having too few.
Whether you have staff twiddling their thumbs or customers unhappy with waiting times, it hurts your bottom line.
Labor costs are one of the biggest expenses for a restaurant. And it’s an expense you must pay even when you have no customers to serve. To complicate things further, your schedule must comply with local regulations. And don’t forget your staff’s personal needs.
It’s essential for the profitability of your restaurant that you get this balancing act right. But how can you correctly predict demand while taking into account labor laws and staff preferences and needs? Not easily. But AI can.
Crunchtime is a restaurant management tool that automatically balances demand, scheduling, and labor laws. Its AI algorithms forecast how much labor you need to meet demand so that you avoid over-or-understaffing.
Using sales data and customer trends, Crunchtime forecasts your staffing needs. It gives real-time data about employee hours, labor expenses, and productivity. And it notifies you when there are any staff-related issues. To give your customers the best possible experience, it looks at your employees' skill levels to assign the right people to meet demand.
You can make compliant schedules with Crunchtime. Whether it’s rules about overtime or break time, Crunchtime takes this into account when automatically making your schedule. You save time making schedules but can be confident you won’t run into any labor law violations.
G2 rating: 4.3/5
Capterra rating: 4.4/5
AI has significant benefits for your restaurant. There are AI-powered tools for employee training, guest experience, waste reduction, and staff scheduling that can make your life easier.
Ready to start training your employees? Try eduMe AI for smooth blended learning, fast content creation, personalized learning, and auto-translated content.