How AI is shaping the restaurant industry

Twenty-six percent of restaurant operators say they are using artificial intelligence-related tools at their restaurants, according to the National Restaurant Association’s State of the Restaurant Industry 2026 report released in February.

Marketing is the top area where AI tools are being used: 19% of full-service operators and 15% of limited-service operators said they use AI to assist with marketing. Ten percent of operators are using a version of the technology for at least some administrative tasks.

While many chains are adopting or testing drive-thru voice automation, only 6% of restaurants are using AI for customer orders.

Despite the lack of adoption of AI for ordering, customers are increasingly comfortable using technology like smartphones, websites, kiosks and tablets at the table to order from a restaurant, according to the report. Roughly six in 10 millennials and Gen Z adults said they would place an order with an AI-generated bot. A majority of Gen Z adults said they are also open to food delivery by robots or drones. 

Operators will continue to invest in technology as it has become an “essential asset,” as they face increased operational costs and constrained consumer spending, according to the NRA. 

“[Technology’s] strategic application is transforming the industry — making operations faster, smarter, and more agile than ever before. In an economy where food and labor costs are rising steadily, breakthrough efficiencies could make the difference between struggling and staying profitable,” the association wrote in its report. 

A majority, 60%, of operators said their technology use is roughly in line with competitors, while 12% say their technology is at the leading edge. The remaining 28% said their technology use is lagging, which could pressure them to adopt new solutions, as a wide majority of operators say technology provides a competitive advantage. 

Six in 10 operators say they plan to invest more in technology to enhance the customer experience, per the NRA. Over half said they will invest in equipment or technology that can help productivity and efficiency within the front of house, while just under half said they would use tech for the back of house.

One of the biggest players at the forefront of tech adoption is Yum Brands, which launched its integrated tech platform called Byte last year. That tech stack includes kitchen management and point of sales systems, as well as some artificial intelligence tools. Last year, Yum partnered with Nvidia to develop AI assets for the drive-thru, call center voice and computer vision, among other tools. Taco Bell began adoption of drive-thru voice AI across the U.S in 2024, but had to rethink adoption last year after inconsistent performance, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

McDonald’s has also indicated that it plans to use more artificial intelligence across its system in the near future. It used voice AI at the drive-thru through a partnership with IBM, but that partnership ended in 2024 after three years.

Artificial intelligence, robotics and automation have been hot topics for years in the restaurant industry. For a long time, the Platonic ideal of AI-powered equipment was something like Flippy, a robotic arm that mixed industrial technologies with traditional restaurant equipment like fryers. But for some, AI applications like that have failed to live up to expectations. Real-world automation in restaurants now takes many forms, too — some of which are difficult to immediately recognize as AI.

“Last year when you came [to the Show] everyone was talking about AI, AI, AI. Most of that was vapor, in my opinion,” said Bryan Solar, chief product officer at SpotOn, a POS solutions firm.

Now, vendors and restaurant brands are more focused on the outcomes driven by AI and automation, rather than the flash of physical innovations, Solar said. Those results-driven technologies might look very different from robot arms, though the National Restaurant Association’s show floor still had its share of those, too. 

Check out the different types of restaurant automation Restaurant Dive spotted at the NRA Show.

Automated managers

One major application for AI and automation in restaurants is tasks traditionally undertaken by managers, including recordkeeping and data analysis.

Callin Godson-Green, a food safety CS manager at SmartSense by Digi, said during a show floor session that automated monitoring and recordkeeping for equipment — like temperature checks for fridges — could help improve safety and reduce breakdowns.

“Manual checks are labor intensive,” Godson-Green said. This issue can be complicated by inaccurate or incomplete recordkeeping. “A majority of the time, you have no idea who completed that log. It's a scribbled-in temperature. They don't sign it. How can we improve that?” 

SmartSense, and other automated systems that detect when equipment is falling out of compliance or nearing a breakdown, can alert managers pre-emptively, reducing spoilage and downtime. For example, Godson-Green cited gradual increases in temperature in a fridge as a red flag. 

Other data-intensive tasks are also ripe for automation. Solar highlighted SpotOn’s new Profit Assist tool, which analyzes the data in a restaurant’s accounting system, like QuickBooks or R365, to find cost savings that might escape all but the most careful and methodical hand checks of data.

Solar said a SpotOn customer used the tech to automatically detect and flag double-billing by a linens vendor, saving $2,000 a month. 

“Is it really sexy to say, ‘I found out you're getting overcharged on your linens’? Maybe not. You're not going to make a billboard for that, but if you're a restaurant, you found $2,000 a month extra. That matters a lot,” Solar said. 

Profit Assist is also capable of detecting anomalies in costs across units so operators can automatically identify outliers in categories like labor allocation or cost of goods sold and take steps to remedy such problems, Solar said.

Task-specific equipment

Some of the automation firms at the NRA Show were there to solve very specific operational problems comprising a fraction of a worker’s tasks, rather than act as managers.

One such machine was Bridge Appliances’ automated egg cooker. Lance Lentini, the founder and CEO of Bridge, said the idea for an egg cooker came from watching production problems at coffee shops during the commute hour. 

“We saw basically the biggest bottleneck behind the counter being preparing for cooking or reheating eggs,” Lentini said. 

The machine can organize 30 eggs, crack them and cook them two at a time, producing sunny-side up eggs that are over easy, medium or hard, depending on programmed settings. Lentini claims that the machine takes less time to cook fresh eggs than other methods. 

Lentini pitched the machine as a way for small coffee shops to expand their menus without significantly increasing labor costs. 

“The average customer that comes in to buy an $8 cup of coffee is now going to add an $8 breakfast sandwich to the purchase ticket,” Lentini said. 

Robot generalists

Outside of hyper-specialized pieces of equipment, the Show played hosts to robots that could fulfill more than one task. One such device is Richtech Robotics’ Adam device. At the show, Adam was programmed to operate as a barista, but Tim Tanksley, Richtech’s director of marketing, said the machine could be programmed to work with a variety of equipment. 

A voice playing at the booth — ostensibly the robot’s — claimed it could make “coffee, shakes, cocktails, boba tea, grill burgers, cook noodles or [perform] any countertop task,” for which it was trained. 

“The training involves the creation of the menu and then programming the movements, and then a little bit of training with the vision,” Tanksley said. The bot, Tanksley noted, can connect to point-of-sales systems and start on orders as they come in. 

Such robots would replace workers covering a multitude of tasks, rather than automating one specific procedure. Other general-purpose robots are less ambitious, but still serve functions beyond cooking one menu item in one particular way.

Pudu Robotics showed off the Bella Bot Pro, an update to its delivery robot, which serves as auxiliary waitstaff, bringing food and drinks to tables and carting away empty dishes. 

The new version of Bella Bot features a video-advertising screen on the robot and AI-voice interaction capabilities, said Meg Timmons, Pudu’s marketing manager for the Americas.

Timmons said the robot could alleviate arduous and repetitive tasks, like carrying heavy dishes to tables or transporting dirty plates and cutlery back to a dishwasher. While something like the Bella Bot can’t do everything waitstaff does, Timmons said the robot has a variety of use cases.

“Our solutions are so flexible and scalable,” Timmons said, adding that some restaurants have to be flexible when integrating robots into their operations.

Timmons said consumer acceptance of these robots was beginning to increase in North America. Part of that might be due to the design of the Bella Bot, which has cat ears and makes feline facial expressions on a digital screen. 

Voice AI

No part of the industry has seen as much automation buzz as voice ordering. Voice automation has been on the rise for years, but with Yum Brands and Nvidia putting significant resources behind drive-thru voice AI, it seems that mass adoption might be here. 

In addition to labor savings, voice AI can be a way to prevent price sensitivity from eroding tickets, said Ben Bellettini, SoundHoud’s senior vice president of sales restaurants. This is made more powerful by large datasets on consumer purchasing habits which, Bellettini said, can ensure that bots are suggesting items consumers actually want. 

“Some of our upsell acceptance rates are beyond double the acceptance rate that you typically see from a restaurant staff member,” Bellettini said. 

SoundHound has tech, called Voice Insights, that can bridge the gap between voice AI and management AI. 

“We have a system that can effectively collect conversational data between a team member and a customer,” Bellettini said. “There's a lot of operational data we can pass through that is voice-data based.”

That tech can analyze tones of voices and give employers greater control of the shop floor.

Palona AI, a phone-ordering AI firm, sees the emergent tech as a way to inject some degree of hospitality back into digital and phone ordering channels.

Many operators have “outsourced a lot of the other ordering to DoorDash or Uber Eats, and so you've been disintermediated from your customers, and you're no longer providing what feels like a hospitality service to people,”  said Tim Howes, Palona’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

Palona is trying to change that by making a chatbot that sounds more human.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on trying to make the conversation fun and something you'd want to actually continue with,” Howes said. “We do that by imbuing more empathy and human likeness into the AI by training on top of large language models.” 

The tech can also mimic brand characters or regional accents.

But the tech has limits, Howes said. It’s an odd user experience when a voice system remembers everything about a consumer from past conversations, and Palona has worked to ensure its system doesn’t creep consumers out by remembering too much. Instead, the phone ordering tool tries to mimic short-term memory, remembering the key information about a consumer and focusing mostly on remembering details within a given conversation. 

With phone tech designed to mimic personalities, accents and even innocuous forgetting, the most realistic face of automation at the NRA Show might have been a disembodied voice, emanating from a phone speaker.

Fogo de Chão has launched an artificial intelligence voice assistant dubbed Selma to answer phone calls, the chain said in a press release. 

The technology is named after Selma Oliveira, Fogo’s chief culture officer, who the company described as its “matriarch” and one of “the most influential leaders behind the brand’s service philosophy.” 

Selma voice assistant will answer calls across all 88 U.S. locations and help free up team members to focus on hospitality. Fogo is among a growing list of brands, including Five Guys, Red Lobster and Torchy’s Tacos, to adopt phone voice assist technology that ensures customers can place orders, get information from a restaurant and make reservations if the option is available.

The addition of Selma is part of Fogo’s growing strategy to incorporate more technology to support its hospitality. The company has been working with Bain Capital, which bought the chain in 2023, over the past two years to modernize its data platform, a process it expects to complete this year, Fogo CEO Barry McGowan told Restaurant Dive during the ICR Conference in January. That platform will be AI-enabled, and include bots that will help analyze consumer, reservation and social sentiment data, he said. 

“All those foundational things we’re investing in marketing are really to focus on the pre-visit, the visit and the post-visit so we can personalize,” McGowan said. “This is what we’re doing with the data and marketing.”

He added that using AI and automation, particularly for marketing, will help the brand compete with larger chains that have bigger marketing budgets and have more brand awareness. 

Selma voice assist can help with the pre-visit information. Oliveira’s voice was recorded in English, Portuguese and Spanish, allowing Fogo to connect with a diverse consumer base. The system can answer all U.S. calls, answer frequently asked questions, check availability and offer real-time reservations. It can transfer calls to in-restaurant teams if needed. 

Fogo claims that early results have led to increased guest satisfaction, high booking completion rates and significant rewards enrollment. The system is expected to generate over 250,000 reservations within its first 12 months. 

The full-service chain is also working on a handheld device — tied to its wait management system. That device will provide staff with information like guest preferences, favorite wines and birthdays to better personalize interactions. It allows guests to pay at the table, and connects to the rewards platform and gift cards, he said. 

“It’s all about enhancing the guest experience,” McGowan said. “That’s what we want technology to do.” 

Yum Brands and Nvidia are working together to speed up Yum’s development of artificial intelligence, the companies announced Tuesday. Nvidia’s technology will support Yum’s proprietary tech system, Byte. Yum is the tech firm’s first restaurant partner.

Yum piloted several AI tools at some Pizza Hut and Taco Bell locations earlier this year, and plans a broader rollout at about 500 restaurants across these brands, KFC and Habit Burger during the second quarter. 

Yum’s strategy in recent years has hinged on building up its proprietary tech systems through acquisitions and in-house development, with the aim of keeping ahead of its major QSR competitors.

Yum said the technologies developed in partnership with Nvidia will focus on three areas: drive-thru and call-center voice AI, computer vision to analyze operations and AI analytics at the restaurant level. The partnership includes Nvidia’s software and may eventually yield “AI agents that plan, reason and act to assist across restaurants,” according to the press release.

The voice ordering tech, which uses Nvidia Riva and Nvidia NIM microservices, can handle complex menus and speech patterns, according to the press release. 

The computer vision tech includes a component of real-time labor surveillance meant to “optimize drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management through real-time analytics and alerts,” the press release said. 

Yum did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the ethical issues raised by algorithmic and AI surveillance of workers.

The restaurant-level analytics, which Yum refers to as Accelerated Restaurant Intelligence, will be used to create action plans for restaurant managers at struggling locations, using best practices from stronger-performing units. 

By working with Nvidia, Yum aims to reduce the cost and increase the speed and quality of the tech tools available to franchisees. The technology also benefits from the scale of Yum’s 61,000 stores and the vast amounts of information generated by its transactions, according to the press release.

Joe Park, Yum’s chief digital and technology officer, said the program would “enable us to harness the rich consumer and operational data sets on our Byte by Yum! integrated platform.”

Tools built through the program will be proprietary to Yum, the press release said. Ultimately, Yum wants to integrate “technology into every touch point, across every restaurant, around the world.”

Last year, Yum announced it would deploy voice-AI at hundreds of Taco Bell drive-thrus. The chain also expanded the number of restaurants using its restaurant coaching mobile app to 20,000 Pizza Hut and KFC locations in more than 120 countries, according to Yum’s most recent earnings call. 

The company’s kitchen and delivery system, called Dragontail before it was folded into Byte, is live in 8,000 stores. Yum plans to expand it across its U.S. systems for Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC in 2025. Likewise, the restaurant company expects to deploy back-of-house management tech across its Taco Bell U.S. store system this year, according to the earnings call.

Wendy’s is on track to implement digital menu boards and AI drive-thru ordering systems at over 500 restaurants by the end of the year, President and CEO Kirk Tanner said during the company’s earnings call on Friday. 

The chain's Fresh AI technology, which automates the drive thru ordering process, has now been deployed to over 160 restaurants across the U.S. The platform continues to improve through company enhancements and interactions with customers, CFO Ken Cook said during the earnings call. 

Digital menu boards and automated drive-thru ordering is part of the chain’s strategic pillar to improve customer experience by providing more personalization, convenience and hospitality, Tanner said. Franchisees began piloting the technology in 2024. 

The implementation of drive-thru AI is part of Wendy’s larger technology strategy that also includes enhancements to its app and an expansion of its loyalty program. These tools could help boost same-store sales, which were down by 2.8% in the U.S. during the first quarter. 

Fresh AI, which Wendy’s began testing in 2023 in partnership with Google Cloud, offers suggestions based on a customer’s order that can increase check size, Tanner said. Additionally, the chain has seen improvements to order accuracy and efficiency in restaurants since employees can now focus on speed of service and delivering an accurate order. 

Wendy’s is among a handful of chains, including Taco Bell, Zaxbys, Church’s Texas Chicken and Bojangles, that have been adding drive-thru AI across their systems. 

Additionally, Wendy’s updated its app by adding gamification that’s engaging customers beyond the point of sale, Tanner said. The app can also now send digital messages to customers that are relevant to them.

“These updates are driving improvements across app engagement metrics, including conversion rate, which reached an all-time high in the first quarter and drove our digital mix to a record of over 20% of total sales,” Tanner said. 

The chain is also rolling out two additional initiatives, menu item label printers and smart delivery scales, to boost order accuracy, which customers say is an important driver of satisfaction, according to Tanner. Menu item labels will ensure that sandwiches are customized per customers’ requests while delivery scales will make sure that customers receive all the items they ordered. 

“In restaurants that utilize these tools, order accuracy is significantly improved,” Tanner said. “While we are still in the early innings of delivering on our promise of a perfect every time experience, we're already making progress, taking the right steps to reach our full potential.”

Presto Phoenix and Dairy Queen will expand their pilot of Presto’s drive-thru voice AI technology “to select franchisees around the country,” after successful testing in the brand’s company-operated units, according to a Thursday press release. 

A Presto spokesperson said the expansion would reach at least 25 franchisees across at least 25 U.S. states and Canadian provinces and that the company intends to eventually deploy the tech across substantially all 3,000 of Dairy Queen’s U.S. and Canadian drive-thrus. The deployment will occur in phases, with the first happening over the next few weeks to capitalize on the advent of ice cream season.

According to its franchise disclosure documents, Dairy Queen had two company-operated units in 2025 and about 1,985 franchised locations of its Grill & Chill and 743 of its limited-menu Treats stores in the U.S.

“Presto has been an excellent partner and our initial results using their AI look quite promising,” Kevin Baartman, Dairy Queen’s executive vice president of IT, said in the press release. “With Presto’s AI, we can enable our staff to focus on high-value tasks that ultimately benefit our Fans, with a friendly experience, and high order accuracy.”

Presto declined to share more specific performance figures.

Presto pivoted from a dual focus on tablet-based payments and voice AI to a singular focus on AI in 2024. The company has worked with QSRs ranging from CKE to Wienerschnitzel. 

In January, the automation firm raised $10 million in new funding to support its expansion. 

Krishna Gupta, one of the firm’s co-founders, returned to Presto’s CEO role earlier this year, succeeding Gee Lefevre, who led Presto through its pivot to AI and subsequent Nasdaq de-listing. The company sold itself to a consortium of investors in late 2024 and changed its name from Presto Automation to Presto Phoenix.

AI is arguably the hottest technology in the restaurant space, with many operators exploring applications to ease pressure from inflation and rising labor, food, and occupancy costs.

“The whole use of AI at restaurants is accelerating,” said Brandon Barton, CEO of Bite, which makes AI-powered food-ordering kiosks. 

Many executives think the hype around AI is warranted. White Castle Vice President Jamie Richardson, for example, said the technology holds “unlimited” potential to improve operations, as well as employee and guest experience. 

But adopting AI requires “patience and perseverance — and a focus on remembering the larger goal you are trying to achieve,” he wrote in an email. That’s been White Castle’s experience with its Julia system, which communicates with drive-thru customers through SoundHound’s voice recognition software. 

White Castle began piloting voice AI at the drive-thrus of select -restaurants last year, and the application is “getting better all the time,” Richardson said.

Since its implementation, Julia has helped White Castle’s team members engage with customers and invest more of their time in ensuring order accuracy and fostering a friendly environment. 

White Castle is one of many restaurants that have embraced AI in recent years. The technology has helped fast casual and fast food restaurants interact with customers either at kiosks or over the phone and at the drive-thru. It can also help restaurants with back-of-house activities, such as managing reservations and order inventory. 

Check out four AI use cases restaurants can implement today or in the near future, according to experts.  

Drive-thru support 

A growing number of restaurant operators are deploying AI ordering technology for their phone and drive-thru systems, Ben Bellettini, senior vice president of restaurant sales at SoundHound, wrote in an email. 

To date, over 10,000 restaurants in the U.S. use SoundHound’s voice AI technology, including White Castle and Jersey Mike’s, said Bellettini. Employee intervention is needed about 5% to 10% of the time when SoundHound’s voice AI is used during customer orders, said Bellittini.

Bite’s kiosks don’t include drive-thru voice ordering, but Barton said it can sometimes be difficult for such AI technology to recognize an order when a loud truck drives by, or when someone has a certain regional accent. 

“Nobody really has deployed voice AI at scale yet and there still needs to be some human interaction to ensure that [the technology is] getting the order correct,” he said. 

But the technology is getting better each year, Barton added. He predicts voice AI will be implemented at scale at the drive-thru over the next couple of years.  

Voice AI technology can help restaurants solve labor shortage issues, Bellettini said. The technology is faster, more accurate and more consistent than human employees, he said, allowing restaurants to process orders quicker and yield higher revenue. 

Drive-thrus can operate faster with AI, Bellettini said, because the tech can instantly engage with the customer as they pull up to the speaker post, compared to an employee, who often takes about 30 seconds to engage.

Voice AI at the drive-thru also removes multitasking pressure from restaurant employees, since it allows them to spend less time engaging with customers at the drive-thru and more time focusing on making food, engaging with customers in the store or at the drive-thru, and working collaboratively with their team members, he said. 

Integration in digital kiosks 

The drive-thru and the phones aren’t the only ways restaurant customers are interacting with AI when ordering food. 

Bite incorporates AI into its in-store, touch-screen, food-ordering kiosks at restaurant chains including Togo’s, California Fish Grill and Fazoli's, said Barton.

AI helps the software layer of Bite’s kiosks to identify repeat customers and loyalty members when they enter their phone number or, when they opt in, to be recognized through facial recognition biometrics, said Barton.

The kiosks then make personalized food recommendations to consumers, factoring in everything from the time of day, weather and ordering patterns in the region or at the specific restaurant that day, said Barton.

The kiosks will flash personalized menu recommendations based on a consumer’s past orders — such as a new spicy chicken sandwich for someone who likes spicy food — or speed up the transaction during lunch rushes by offering a slimmed-down menu. The Bite kiosks can also display ways guests can customize their orders, such as asking if they want bacon on their burger, he said.

Through this technology, checks, on average, increase 15% to 25%, said Barton. “Guests are spending more and we attribute that to them having an easier and better ordering experience.”

The proper deployment of AI “should be reducing food costs, it should be reducing labor costs overall, and it should be making the teams’ jobs that they do more high-touch, or high impact,” said Barton. “The result is the increasing of guest satisfaction scores and their feelings towards hospitality.”

Employee assistance with food prep

Some restaurants are utilizing SoundHound’s employee assist voice technology, which provides instant answers to urgent employee questions over a headset or tablet, such as how to prep a particular item or information about a product’s ingredients or allergens, he said. 

The technology, released last year, can tell an employee how long to cook french fries or onion rings, how many pumps of syrup are needed when making a vanilla iced coffee, or the cleaning solution needed to clean the griddle. So far, a handful of “well-known restaurants” are currently testing or deploying the technology, a company spokesperson stated, but didn’t disclose specific brands.

That technology, said Bellettini, helps restaurant operators ensure that food is always prepared to standard across all locations as they hire and train new employees. 

“This enables them to help customers without ever having to pick up a manual or distract another member of the team,” said Bellettini. 

Forecasting customer and product demand

Restaurants will also soon start leaning heavily on AI to analyze guest data to help them forecast demand, predicts Matt Tucker, head of reservation management software firm Tock.

Tock is currently exploring how to incorporate AI into its waitlist and walk-in platforms, said Tucker. That means AI could play a larger role in determining how long guests will wait for a seat at a particular restaurant.

AI can bring together disparate data points to optimize restaurant operations and provide tools that improve staff scheduling, waste management, and quality control, said Tucker. Those tools could “help remove the guesswork for operators,” he said. 

AI won’t replace the human touch in hospitality, said Tucker, but it will automate recurring tasks like determining when to reorder inventory based on ingredients used in dishes sold during the past week. 

When AI is integrated into inventory-ordering operations, the technology could predict what customers will be ordering, said Barton. That allows restaurants to plan ahead better through more complex algorithms beyond using simply ordering based on the average of what people purchased over the past seven Fridays, he said. 

And while there are still variables, such as the quality or shelf-life of the product that’s delivered to the restaurant, AI will make ordering inventory more accurate, he said. 

“The old way to do this was just using averages, and the new way is using AI. It’s going to be more accurate,” said Barton. “Generally speaking, if you’re deploying AI into your ordering processes, into your recipe processes, then you will be lowering your food costs.”