PAR and Square this week unveiled AI tools that can do things on operators’ behalf, like run marketing campaigns and draft employee schedules. They’re part of a new wave of AI aimed at supercharging productivity.

Here come the AI restaurant agents.

This week, two large restaurant tech suppliers, PAR Technology and Square, unveiled AI products that can assist operators with their business and even complete tasks on their behalf. They joined a number of other companies, like Toast and Thanx, that have launched similar tools over the past year.

They’re part of the growing field of agentic AI, or smart software that can act on its own, sometimes even without being asked. It goes a step further than generative AI, which usually involves chatbots that can answer questions or create images.

At the CES tech conference last year, Jensen Huang, the CEO of AI giant Nvidia, declared that “the age of AI agentics is here.” He argued that AI agents present a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for businesses due to their ability to supercharge productivity.

Here’s a look at how PAR and Square see their agents playing out in restaurants.

PAR’s ‘AI layer’

The company’s new PAR Intelligence system features several agents that do different things. There is the Insights Agent, which can surface sales and other business data and make recommendations; the Offers Agent, which can create and deploy marketing campaigns; and the Developer Assist Agent, which restaurant IT teams can use to help speed up integrations and development.

Because they are directly tied to PAR’s other products, like POS and marketing, PAR says the agents are able to provide operators with “one source of truth.” And it was built specifically for large restaurant operators, who may oversee dozens or hundreds of locations, all of which have different needs.

For example, Taco Bell franchisee Charter Foods began testing one of PAR’s agents last year and asked it to identify stores that could benefit by staying open later. Late-night sales increased 20% as a result of its recommendations.

The big unlock is that the AI saves time, said Charter Senior Director John Rankin. “In this industry, speed of analyzing data is real money,” he told NRN sibling publication Restaurant Business in September.

Square’s Managerbot

Managerbot builds upon Square’s previous AI assistant, which was more like a chatbot that could answer questions about the business.

While the old assistant was reactive, Managerbot is proactive: It surfaces insights and other metrics that it believes the restaurant needs to know, like that it’s running low on milk, or that several menu items have duplicate names in the POS.

It can also perform tasks, such as drafting employee schedules, creating and running email campaigns, and generating purchase orders for supplies. The operator just needs to ask, though they will have a chance to check the bot’s work before it moves forward.

Donnie McClanahan has been using Managerbot for several weeks at his group of cafes in Knoxville, Tennessee. He now starts his day by asking the bot for an update on his stores. And things that he would previously have had to call and ask a staffer to do manually can now be handled by the bot.

“The espresso machine is down at Tombras Cafe. Can you put all of the craft coffees out of stock and schedule them to be put back available in the morning?” he wrote in a blog post. “[Managerbot] has got my back.”

AI agents will only be as good as the data they are given to work with, which means they’ll need to be fully integrated across a restaurant’s existing tech stack. And they are not totally hands-off. Square noted that Managerbot, like any AI system, can make mistakes, and urged operators to check its responses for accuracy.

There are also questions about whether agents could make some restaurant jobs irrelevant. In an FAQ section on its website, PAR said its agents are not intended to replace people.

“PAR Intelligence is designed to make your best people even better—faster decisions, clearer priorities, less time in dashboards and spreadsheets,” it said.

Source https://www.nrn.com/restaurant-technology/the-hot-new-restaurant-tech-trend-ai-agents