Restaurants Leverage Conversational AI to Automate Order-Taking

As restaurants seek out more labor-efficient ways to keep operations running in the face of a challenging labor environment, many are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to automate routine tasks. One major area of growth in AI in the recent past has been conversational AI, leveraging messaging and voice-based technology to automate ordering in a way that feels simple and intuitive for consumers.

On Tuesday (March 29), for instance, Ohio-based chain Marco’s Pizza, which has more than 1,000 stores in the U.S. and the Bahamas, announced that it is testing a voice-to-text ordering system at 50 locations whereby consumers call in their orders, and the technology converts the order to text and alerts employees.

“There are places where AI makes sense within the business — where it creates a better experience for both team members and guests,” Rick Stanbridge, senior vice president and chief information officer for Marco’s Pizza, said in a statement. “Not only does this technology offer franchisees a cost-effective, practical solution to reduce labor costs and drive results, but it provides support to team members while strengthening the guest experience.”

The move comes less than two months after Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and The Habit Burger Grill, shared on a call with analysts that, after acquiring conversational commerce technology company Tictuk in 2021, the restaurant company had chat-based ordering up and running at almost 2,000 stores by the end of the year.

Related news: Yum Brands Rolls out Conversational Commerce to 2,000 Stores

While Tictuk’s conversational commerce is primarily text chat, other restaurants are leveraging conversational AI to offer voice ordering. McDonald’s, for one, is working with IBM to speed up the development and launch of its Automated Order Taking (AOT) technology for drive-thru voice orders.

See also: McDonald's Teams With IBM to Super-Size Drive-Thru Lane Tech

“More and more when we watch people interact with their devices, it’s voice,” Portillo’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Off-Premise Dining Nick Scarpino told PYMNTS in a January interview. “It’s sometimes the primary way that people are interacting with their devices.”

More details: Portillo’s Reimagines Its Restaurants for the Mobile-Order Future

Findings from PYMNTS’ 2021 How We Eat Playbook, created in collaboration with Carat from Fiserv, which drew from a survey of a census-balanced panel of more than 5,200 U.S. consumers, showed that 20% of consumers say they are “very” or “extremely” interested in using their voices to buy food and groceries.

You may also like: 182M Consumers Now Use Digital Channels to Shop and Pay for Food

Additionally, the study revealed that consumers who have shifted to ordering food and groceries online more often than they did pre-pandemic are more than twice as likely to express interest in using voice commerce technology going forward.

Moreover, PYMNTS’ The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Index: The Digital Transformation of Retail and the Consumer Shopping Experience, created in collaboration Cybersource, which surveyed 13,000 consumers and 3,100 merchants across six countries, found that merchants in each of the countries were far more likely to offer voice-enabled purchases than their customers were to use them.

In the United States, for instance, 54% of merchants offer these features, and 43% of consumers use them. In Brazil, meanwhile, the gap is even wider, with 76% of merchants offering them and 33% of consumers using them.

Read more: Restaurants Invest in Voice Ordering Technology Despite Slow Adoption