Marketing & Promotions
AI for Restaurants: 10 Genius Ways to Implement AI in 2026
5 min read
Jul 6, 2026
5 min read
Jul 6, 2026
Has your restaurant embraced AI yet?
Chances are you already have, whether it's the grammar checker on your marketing email or a pricing model running in the background. You're in good company according to the SevenRooms industry data: 79% of U.S. operators use AI in some form, followed by 87% in the UAE., 74% in the U.K. and 65% in Australia.
In practice, restaurant AI is software that answers phones, summarizes guest feedback, predicts demand and takes on the repetitive work that pulls staff off the floor. Below are ten ways to put it to work across marketing and operations, with operator examples and the tools behind each.
AI adoption has changed how restaurant marketers handle content, from blog posts and social captions, to images and digital marketing copy. Among operators who use AI for marketing, 51% use it for video creation, 42% for images and 36% for copywriting.
The tools behind this draw on natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to read context and tone, then produce work that fits your audience. Generative AI gives you a fast first draft, though the output still needs a human eye before it goes live.
Kevin Coetzee, people director at Humble Grape in the UK, says his team uses AI across all of marketing.
"We actively use AI in marketing, SEO, social media posts and various other written tasks using ChatGPT. The team also uses it for email responses, letter drafting and HR functions like job adverts and descriptions."
However, it’s important to remember that AI is only as effective as the prompts you feed it. To ensure the content resonates with your audience and reflects your unique brand, investing time in training the AI to match your voice and tone is crucial.
With the right setup, AI can be a powerful tool in creating marketing that feels just as personal and on-brand as if written by a team member.
The average restaurant uses between 4 and 5 systems to manage their operations. That's a lot of different data and reports that don't connect. AI steps in by aggregating that information across every system, showing repeat patterns in your restaurant’s overall performance.
Coetzee from the Humble Grape uses an AI bot that pulls from SevenRooms, Harri and Lightspeed, then compiles it into one report.
Kelly MacPherson, chief supply chain and technology officer at Union Square Hospitality Group, values how accessible reporting has become with AI:
"AI elevates our storytelling around data. We have a wealth of data at our fingertips, but this can create analysis paralysis. With AI, we can more efficiently synthesize the data, create stories about what's happening, why it's happening, and what we can do about it, and then present these stories to our teams in a digestible format with actionable next steps."
Knowing how guests feel about your restaurant once required reading every review one by one. SevenRooms AI Feedback Summary aggregates feedback across review platforms, so you can see trends at a glance and, if needed, respond to Google Reviews in-app.
By flagging common themes, SevenRooms’ AI software points you to problems fast. If guests repeatedly note slow weekend service, you’ll see it right away so you can investigate and fix it. Pairing that with automated reputation management, leads to shorter response time and a more consistent experience for your customers.
As David from JKS Restaurants in the UK explained:
"The most impactful way we've been using AI is to summarise and identify trends in qualitative feedback from our guests. This has saved hours of time for our team, helped remove human bias in manual summarisation and surfaced actionable insights that have improved service in our restaurants."
In 2025, SevenRooms found that 79% of diners globally are comfortable with AI handling reservations. Operators are slower to follow, with only 32% using AI for call management. This gap is significant: 40% of those calls are going unanswered.
SevenRooms Voice AI phone answering takes calls automatically, logs booking details to guest profiles and routes complex requests to staff, 24/7.
AI can also be used to draft responses to customer inquiries via email and text. This helps teams quickly craft responses based on sentiment and tone, which can then be edited and sent.
On average, SevenRooms customers using AI-powered messaging show a 27% decrease in response time for guest inquiries across email, SMS and reviews.
Setting the restaurant’s voice and tone is critical to reflect answers that feel and sound like your unique brand, so don’t forget to incorporate that information into your AI prompts.
Implementing a chatbot on your website is one of the easiest ways to get started with AI. These AI-powered virtual assistants can handle common customer inquiries, reservations and orders without human intervention, freeing your staff up to focus on other tasks.
But they can also escalate issues to the appropriate departments if guests need more help.
Even better? Chatbots are available 24/7, allowing you to provide around-the-clock customer service.
Kevin at Humble Grape also shared how he uses chatbots to provide a more interactive and engaging experience for website visitors while taking advantage of automation. “We use a chatbot on our website to funnel and direct inquiries from customers to the relevant stream — like weddings or private events versus an FAQ.”
But chatbots don’t only have to be guest-facing.
Take McDonald’s, for example. The fast food chain implemented a chatbot named “Ask Pickles” to assist workers during their shifts. Pickles was trained on the company manuals, enabling it to provide answers to common shift conundrums like how to clean the chain’s ice cream machines.
Faster answers and enhanced productivity? We’re lovin’ it!
Your top sellers and your dead weight are already in the sales data. AI reads it to guide both menu and pricing calls for higher profitability.
The result is menu and pricing optimization grounded in accurate sales patterns. Operators chasing more revenue per cover can increase the average check size through upselling and bundling strategies.
Kylie Moncur, chief marketing officer at Australian Venue Co. (AVC) shared their plans to build an AI menu analysis model that provides strategic recommendations:
“We’re building an AI tool that can analyse menu structure & dish performance and will provide recommendations to optimise dishes and the overall menu. AI enabled menu engineering will inform things like position on menu and our upsell and bundling strategies.”
As a group with 220+ bespoke menus, AVC needs an AI solution that can provide nuanced guidance for their kitchen teams to help optimize based on individual product needs and performance.
“From a product perspective, the tool can identify whether a menu is missing elements that we consider essential, such as including enough dietary-friendly dishes across menu sections and dish styles, or that we have a minimum number of certain dishes or types of dishes. From a menu performance perspective, the tool can analyse volume, contribution margin and total contribution at an item level, to guide chefs as they review their menus to improve or replace dishes. Overall, the tool will guide kitchen teams in optimising menus to continuously improve customer experience as well as commercial performance.”
Table management can be a puzzle even the most experienced restaurateur needs help solving. Enter: artificial intelligence.
AI software can predict guest arrival patterns, optimize seating arrangements and reduce wait times. This improves your guests’ dining experience by ensuring they’re seated promptly and can also lead to more revenue.
SevenRooms’ Table Management software uses an AI-driven seating algorithm that considers over 10,000 combinations every second. This reduces wait times and maximizes your floor plan, so you can serve more guests more often.
Reducing wait times is only part of the equation. For a fuller picture, revenue management per shift covers how to maximize what each seated table contributes.
With AI inventory management, over- or under-ordering is a solved problem. Tracking stock levels in real time and predicting usage patterns results in better inventory control, cost savings and food waste reduction.
Dishoom, a London restaurant group, reduced food waste by 20% with an AI-powered tool. Since less waste feeds straight into margins, calculating food cost percentage is a useful next step once your inventory workflow tightens up.
AI keeps fresh stock on hand too, placing an order the moment usage rates predict an ingredient will run low, so you're never telling the brunch crowd the frittata is off.
Hiring, training and scheduling all run smoother with AI in the mix. It screens resumes to identify strong candidates against criteria you set, which lifts hire quality and curbs turnover.
On scheduling, AI reads historical patterns to put the right number of staff on at the right times, controlling labor costs and easing the burnout that comes with overworking a team. Getting staffing right starts before doors open: restaurant pre-shift checklists get teams aligned on priorities before service starts.
Some KFC, Taco Bell and Dairy Queen franchises run an AI system called Riley that reviews performance data and rewards top upsellers.
AI in restaurants can bring a lot to the table, from table management to content creation, but it can't replace the human side of hospitality. Combine the two and get the best of both. The more technology reshapes the industry, the more the fundamentals of hospitality come into focus.
As Kinesh Patel, co-founder and chief technology officer at SevenRooms, said:
"AI has the potential to create a golden age for hospitality – an age of SuperHuman Hospitality™. With AI becoming ubiquitous, you're going to have increased demand for human experiences. And the other part of the equation is that restaurants will inevitably use robotics in the back of house or back offices to streamline cost…so you're going to have expanded margins in restaurants because AI helps reduce their cost…the combination of those things is going to make hospitality really attractive."
Start with the AI already built into your reservations and CRM platform, no separate integration needed. Voice AI for phone reservations and AI Feedback Summary for review management offer the shortest setup time and clearest ROI. From there, AI-driven table management and behavioral campaigns follow naturally.
AI voice ordering systems answer incoming calls automatically, capture booking details and log the reservation straight into a CRM without a staff member picking up. SevenRooms found that 64% of diners still call to make a booking; yet, the phone is often ignored. SevenRooms Voice AI handles reservations, cancellations and guest questions 24/7, routing complex requests to staff.
AI for restaurants analyzes data and generates predictions or responses from patterns: no-show scoring, review trend identification, voice-based booking. Automation runs rule-based tasks on set conditions, like sending a post-visit follow-up email a fixed number of hours after a reservation closes. AI adapts as it processes more data, while automation delivers consistent execution of the rules an operator sets.
No. AI handles the logistical, data-heavy layer, answering calls, routing reviews and surfacing guest preferences, which frees front-of-house teams to focus on hospitality. Staff-facing AI tools are built to make servers and hosts look more attentive, not to replace them.
ChatGPT can emulate writing styles. If you have published bylines, ask ChatGPT to write in your voice. Otherwise, choose a writer whose style fits your brand and include that direction in your prompt.”
Casper Hospitality put Voice AI on the phones and, in one month, saw the math work: 3,800+ calls handled, 850+ covers created, $28K booked revenue reported in the 2026 Trends Report.
SevenRooms brings Voice AI, AI Feedback Summary and AI-driven table management together with reservations, guest communications and marketing in one system.