AI Ordering System for Restaurants with Drive-Thru AI Automation

The client needed a more intelligent, autonomous system that could actively manage restaurant frontline operations without relying heavily on human intervention. Their key challenges included:

• Inefficiencies in order processing caused long line-ups of customers and limited throughput. 
• Staff were spending excessive time on repetitive tasks that could be automated. 
• The customer required an intelligent AI ordering system that could autonomously learn and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities and suggest relevant combos to customers. 
• Increasing labour costs and shortages in workforce required automated solutions for business continuity. 
• The customer wanted a system that could take actions, rather than just respond, throughout the entire order workflow, reinforcing the need for restaurant workflow automation and drive-thru AI automation.

Seaflux, acting as an expert AI app development company, created an Agentic AI-based multi-experience voice assistant, designed to autonomously manage the entire customer interaction lifecycle for restaurants and retail businesses. This system surpasses traditional AI assistants by reasoning, initiating, and executing multi-step tasks without needing constant prompting from a human.

As a leading example of agentic AI for restaurants, the solution provides:

• Managing tasks autonomously: The solution lets customers inquire, place orders, follow decision flows, and receive upsells when appropriate, all without human interaction, which directly improves restaurant operations management.
   
• Conversational intelligence at the point of sale: The AI voice assistant can simulate human-to-human interaction, using sophisticated algorithms and natural language processing along with voice recognition capabilities that facilitate natural interaction in context, making restaurant voice ordering more seamless.
   
• Personalized decision-making: It evaluates customer preferences, needs, and historical patterns to generate tailored recommendations in real time, improving drive-thru speed and quality.
   
• Distributed intelligence: Although the NLP model operates locally to provide low-latency interaction, the recommendation engine utilizes an ML model (Decision Tree and Random Forest) that allows the agent to determine what to promote next.
   
• Autonomy with action orientation: An autonomous workflow orchestration acts on its own instead of waiting for instructions, identifying tasks and opportunities that can be handled more quickly, guiding discussions, and handling operational flows from beginning to end, further enabling seamless AI-powered restaurant workflow automation.
   
• Seamless Ecosystem integration: The solution is architected for seamless implementation through contemporary cloud POS systems such as Square, Brink, Toast, NCR, and Omnivore.

• High-volume drive-thru handling: The Agentic AI manages increased customer flow efficiently by leveraging its intelligent ordering system capabilities to streamline decision-making and enhance throughput.
   
• 34% quarterly increase in drive-thru revenue: Achieved through faster processing and intelligent decision-making by the agent.
   
• 10:1 ROI: Significant reduction in labor expenses due to the agent’s ability to perform the work of multiple frontline employees.
   
• 28.7% increase in cross-selling & upselling: Intelligent combo suggestions driven by the agent’s decision models resulted in a substantial rise in multi-item orders.