Restaurants are using artificial intelligence (AI)

to answer the phone and tell them what they want to hear.

Make sure you’re speaking to a real person the next time you phone a restaurant to reserve a seat.

This is because, according to Wired, an increasing number of eateries are using artificial intelligence (AI) to manage phone reservations

one of the more underutilized applications of technology in the hospitality industry.

Only in the last few years have a plethora of these services been introduced. According to Wired, they include the businesses Maitre-D AI, which will launch in the Bay Area in 2024, RestoHost, which currently answers calls at more than 150 Atlantan restaurants, and Slang, which changed its focus last year and started providing AI services to eateries after raising about $20 million in funding.

As far as careless applications of AI go, this is a somewhat low-stakes use case, but it illustrates how widespread AI is in replacing human customer support positions across numerous industries.

The creators of these AI assistants present their technology as a solution to relieve overworked restaurant employees, particularly in the post-pandemic era when many of these businesses are notoriously understaffed.

According to Wired, Alex Sambvani, CEO and co-founder of Slang, “restaurants get a high volume of phone calls compared to other businesses, especially if they’re popular and take reservations.”

According to Sambvani, popular restaurants, at least in the major cities that his company serves, receive between 800 and 1,000 calls a month. At the upper end of that range, that number may include over thirty customers who call in each day, potentially expressing confusion or anger. And who’s up for handling that?

According to Matt Ho, a RestoHost user and restaurant owner in San Francisco, “the phones would ring constantly throughout service.” He told Wired this. “We would receive calls for basic questions that can be found on our website.”

“This platform makes the job easier for the host and does not disturb guests while they’re enjoying their meal,” he stated.

That’s all very nice. However, these AI models are frequently slow and confused by queries from customers (see: AI-powered drive-thrus).

According to the Wired reporter, “many AI voice agents I called asked me to wait as they were conjuring an answer, or simply remained statically silent before replying.” For example, if she decided to cancel a reservation in the middle of the chat, the AI would become unresponsive.

The tech’s performance did not impress every restaurant owner, though. Initially, Brian Owens, who employed Slang after reopening several of his New York restaurants, found the idea of utilizing AI to reduce labor costs to be reasonable.

After he saw how the AI often left customers dissatisfied, however, he was disabused of that belief.
“If you’re asking a robot how the vibe at the restaurant is, versus someone who is able to explain it by not using keywords you know the difference,” Owens told Wired. “I train my host staff to answer the phone with a smile, and you’re not getting a smile when you’re using AI.”

He may be onto something. For some customers, any company using AI is a total deal breaker; one recent survey showed that over half would switch to a competitor if they found a business was using AI in a customer service role. Maybe it’s best, then, just to have an actual person pick up the phone.