AI IS HERE TO STAY

Last quarter, we encouraged operators to stop fearing AI and start experimenting with it.

This quarter, our perspective is even simpler.

AI IS HERE TO STAY

The hospitality industry has never been static. We adapted to online reservations when many thought guests would never give up calling restaurants directly. We adapted to delivery platforms, social media marketing, QR codes, dynamic pricing, and countless other changes that once felt disruptive and now feel ordinary. AI may be the biggest technological shift our industry has experienced in decades, but the pattern is familiar: hospitality adapts. It always has.

Running a restaurant has always required operators to wear an unreasonable number of hats. On any given day, you're expected to be a strategist, marketer, analyst, trainer, recruiter, manager, and host. The challenge has never been a lack of ideas. The challenge has always been finding enough time and energy to execute them.

And that's where we think many operators are getting AI wrong.

The pattern we're seeing across the industry is operators confusing acquisition with adoption. A new AI scheduling tool gets added to the stack. An AI marketing platform gets a free trial. A "smart" inventory feature gets unlocked inside the POS system they've had for three years. And then... nothing. Most of it sits unused inside dashboards that get opened once a month, buried under tabs nobody has time to navigate between the lunch rush and end-of-day reporting.

The operators getting the most value out of AI are rarely the ones using it everywhere. They're the ones using it intentionally, and that intentionality tends to show up in three places: the decisions nobody sees, the people doing the work, and the guests those people are serving.

This is where AI becomes interesting, not as a replacement for experience, instinct, or hospitality, but as an extension of them.

YOUR SALES.

Start with the decisions nobody sees. This is the least glamorous use of AI in the entire toolkit, which is exactly why most operators skip it, but it's also the one with the fastest payback. Most operators know which dishes are popular. Far fewer know how much of each one to actually prep, what they're losing to waste, or what happens to their margins if they raise a price by fifty cents.

TIP 01

Pull 90 days of sales data by daypart from your POS, feed it into Claude or a simple Excel model, and ask it to identify average covers and menu mix by day and shift—a data-backed prep guide instead of a guess. (Tools like Galley or Meez integrate directly with POS systems to automate this.)

TIP 02

On the ordering side, tie your sales mix to a recipe cost sheet and ask AI to calculate theoretical usage against what you actually received; the gap is your waste and variance number, and platforms like MarketMan or Craftable will run that comparison for you automatically.

TIP 03

Before raising prices on gut feel, build a simple spreadsheet of your menu prices, item costs, and sales volumes, and ask AI to model what happens to gross profit at fifty cents, a dollar, a dollar fifty. None of it requires new instinct. It just turns a guess into a number.

YOUR TEAM.

Then there's the team running the floor, and this is where the size gap used to be most unfair. A twenty-unit group has an HR department and a training pipeline. A one-location restaurant has a manager doing it between shifts, and that's where the cracks start, because there's no time to do it well.

TIP 04

Write a prompt describing your restaurant, your service style, and the role you're training for, and ask AI to build a training guide, quiz, or onboarding checklist, a first draft of a full server training manual in under an hour, the kind of thing that used to take weeks with an outside consultant.

TIP 05

Your POS already tracks ticket times, voids, comps, and upsell rates by server; export that data and ask AI to rank performance and flag the outliers worth a coaching conversation.

YOUR GUEST.

And then there's the guest. This is also where we'd add a caution. We've seen operators reach for AI to write Instagram captions before they've used it to audit their menu margins, and we've seen marketing content that sounds like every other restaurant in the city because someone hit "generate" and posted without a second thought.

Your voice is not a small thing. It's often the only differentiator you have. Used well, AI doesn't replace that voice, it gives you more to say with it.

TIP 06

Export your Google, Yelp, and survey responses into a spreadsheet, drop it into Claude or ChatGPT, and ask it to categorize the reviews by theme—top five recurring compliments, top five recurring complaints, even the specific words guests use to describe the experience. What used to mean reading two hundred reviews manually becomes a structured breakdown in minutes, and operators can build campaigns around what guests are actually telling them instead of guessing.

TIP 07

The same logic carries into retention: if you're running a loyalty program through Toast Loyalty, Paytronix, or SpotOn, AI segmentation is increasingly built in. If yours isn't, export your customer list with visit frequency and spend, sort it into groups—lapsed guests, high-frequency low-spenders, high-spend occasional visitors—and draft a different message for each one. A batch-and-blast email and a note to a lapsed VIP shouldn't read the same, and now there's no excuse for them to.

TIP 08

It gets even more specific at the table: your POS or reservation platform (Toast, OpenTable, SevenRooms) already captures order history and notes, and AI layers on top of it to surface patterns automatically—this guest orders gluten-free, visits Friday nights, always orders wine. SevenRooms does this natively; if your system doesn't, feed exported guest data into Claude or ChatGPT to build the profile manually. Used thoughtfully, technology doesn't replace hospitality, it gives staff better information to deliver it.

None of this requires size. A one-location café can run the same playbook as a twenty-unit group. For years, scale was an advantage because it bought access to resources. AI is beginning to level that playing field.

These aren't futuristic possibilities. They're already happening across the industry.

AI shouldn't make hospitality less human. By reducing the hours spent on repetitive work, it actually creates more opportunities for the parts of hospitality that have always mattered most: developing teams, creating memorable guest experiences, and building restaurants people genuinely love returning to.

AI also isn't replacing operational discipline. It's amplifying it. The operators who benefit most won't necessarily be the ones using the newest tools; they'll be the ones asking better questions and making smarter decisions.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The future of hospitality won't be less human because of AI. If operators use it wisely, it may become the very thing that gives them more time to be human in the first place.

We're here if you want to chat more.

Otherwise, see you next quarter.

Cheers,
The Schooligans

HUNGRY SINCE 2012