3 Ways A.I. Is Transforming the Hospitality Industry
How restaurants, hotels, and other businesses are using artificial intelligence to create better customer experiences.
Few industries have been hit as hard by the pandemic as the hospitality industry. According to a January 2022 study by the National Restaurant Association, 74 percent of restaurant operators said their business is less profitable now than it was before the pandemic, and 63 percent of operators said that their sales volume in 2021 was lower than in 2019.
Employee retention hasn't gotten any easier either,as workers are leaving the hospitality industry in record numbers. According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5.6 percent of employees in the food services and accommodation industry quit their jobs in April 2022, more than in any other sector.
Artificial intelligence could help hospitality businesses that are understaffed and tight on cash. Several companies now offerA.I.-based solutions to improve and streamline both guest experiences and back-of-house operations, including inventory and supply chain management, menu optimization, guest profiles, and crowd control.
Here's how three providers are working to implement A.I. solutions across the hospitality industry.
1. Streamlining data analysis.
CrunchTime, an operations platform founded in 1995, works with restaurant chains of all sizes to simplify operations using A.I. and machine learning. Clients include industry giants like Dunkin', Wendy's, and Shake Shack, along with hundreds of single-location small businesses.
One of the reasons restaurants are ripe for A.I. implementation is that a single transaction can produce a significant amount of data, such as how many guests are in a restaurant at any given time, what they're buying, how much they're buying, and how they bought it, according to CrunchTime founder Bill Bellissimo. Traditionally, all of that data would be recorded and analyzed by the general manager to be used in bookkeeping and inventory management operations, a process typically completed by slowly, manually entering the data into a spreadsheet or on paper. With the advent of machine learning, these tasks can be easily streamlined, leaving restaurant owners with more time to focus on what humans excel at: food and experiences.
