AI agents for restaurants

In an independent restaurant the owner or general manager hires, schedules, orders, watches costs and handles complaints. The chef plans the menu, costs recipes, orders food and keeps the kitchen clean and safe. The front-of-house manager runs reservations, the floor plan and pre-shift. Servers and bartenders take orders, answer menu and allergen questions and check IDs. A bookkeeper, often outside, enters supplier invoices and payroll.

The admin sits around service. Supplier invoices arrive as PDFs and photos with mixed units and handwritten receiving notes, and a missing credit goes unnoticed. Prep is set from memory, so the kitchen runs out or throws food away. The pre-shift meeting is run off a phone, so the server learns about the anniversary from the guest. A seasonal menu change reaches the POS but not the website, the Business Profile or the delivery apps. Sales, purchases and labour live in three places, and the month closes too late to change anything.

An agent works from your POS, scheduling tool, reservation exports and invoices, and the chef or manager approves each draft.

• Reads supplier invoices into lines, normalises units, and flags price jumps and missing credits.
• Drafts tomorrow's prep list from sales history and par levels, for the chef to adjust.
• Turns the reservation book into a pre-shift briefing: large parties, occasions, allergy notes and regulars.
• Drafts next week's staff schedule from availability, time-off requests and expected covers, within any local scheduling rule.
• Sends the owner a weekly prime cost summary in plain English, and recosts recipes when ingredient prices move.
• Rolls a menu change out to the website, listings and delivery apps with a checklist.
• Turns private dining inquiries into a set-menu proposal the manager approves.

Anything that says a dish is safe for an allergy is signed off by the chef, recipe by recipe; there are nine major allergens in the US, including sesame. Food-safety corrective actions, and anything said to an inspector under the local version of the Food Code, stay with the kitchen. Under the FLSA managers may not keep any part of employees' tips, so a tool can do the arithmetic on the owner's written tip policy but never sets it. Wages, prices, hiring and discipline are the owner's decisions. Employee illness details are health information and stay out of AI tools. Card numbers are never handled; the agent uses the POS's own reports. Messages to guests go out only in wording the owner has approved.