As the world embraces AI solutions to optimize business, operators need to remember that many diners prioritize authentic, tangible experiences over digitally-powered efficiency, writes James Tice.

Ask yourself why anyone actually goes out to eat, because it’s almost never about the food itself. You go to a restaurant to be served for an hour or two, in a place where the outside world stops existing for a little while.

I say that as someone who spent years working as a server, a bar back, a bartender, and even cooking as a private chef before I ever moved into financial technology exclusively for restaurant operators. When the industry is described as a broken business that needs to be fixed, we know exactly what that sounds like from the dining room floor.

Very little about this industry runs on the Silicon Valley playbook, and most “swap in an AI” pitches feel disconnected from a restaurant’s reality. Cold emails don’t work here, because everything gets done person to person, with a handshake. So when technology shows up promising to remove the people from a people business, operators can smell it immediately, and are right to walk away.

The customers are already telling us what they want
None of this is an argument against technology. The problem is AI pointed at the guest experience, when that experience is the one thing an operator can’t afford to dilute, and customers are already saying as much.

Fortune recently reported roughly 80% of consumers still prefer ordering from a human over an AI agent. Yet executives keep rolling out drive-thru bots and then acting surprised when nobody wants them even though the bread and butter of a restaurant is how people feel when they interact with it, in any form. Automating that feeling away doesn’t cut a cost so much as it cuts the product itself, which is the experience.

Set that against what McDonald’s did with its ordering kiosks. Instead of stripping the person out of the transaction, the chain used technology to turn ordering into something closer to a game, where guests browse, customize and take their time. The kiosk keeps the experience intact and changes how a customer moves through it, which is the same industry acting on the opposite instinct.

That is the difference between technology that is built strictly for efficiency and technology created to scale hospitality.

Source https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/restaurants-cant-automate-hospitality/827363/