AI for restaurants: what it does well in 2026, by task

Restaurants use AI for eight jobs: phone calls and orders, drive-thru orders, kiosks, online-order suggestions, staff schedules, inventory, marketing and kitchen robots. For a single restaurant, phone answering, online suggestions and sales-based scheduling are the easiest to try now. Drive-thru voice, voice kiosks and kitchen robots are still in tests, and large chains have pulled some back.

The table sums up each job. Each section below gives a named example with its source, what to check before you buy, and how mature the tool looks. Maturity is our reading of vendor pages and news reports; we did not test these tools.

Which restaurant jobs can AI do today?

Job	What the AI does	Named example	Maturity	Start here if
Phone calls and orders	Answers questions, takes orders into the POS, transfers calls to staff	Maple; SoundHound	Sold today with published plans	Calls go unanswered during service
Drive-thru	Takes the order at the speaker	Taco Bell with Omilia; Burger King tests	Large rollouts, and some reversals	You run a lane and can staff a fallback
Kiosk	Suggests add-ons; voice kiosks take spoken orders	Toast Menu Upsells; Maple Kiosk (early access)	Suggestions ship in POS products; voice is early	The counter line backs up at peaks
Online and app orders	Suggests items from the cart and order history	Olo Smart Cross-Sells	Available in ordering platforms	Most orders come through your site or app
Scheduling	Forecasts sales and suggests staffing	7shifts; Toast IQ	Widely sold; a manager approves	You build the schedule by hand each week
Inventory	Counts stock by camera, reads invoices	Starbucks with NomadGo (ended); Toast invoice scanning (beta)	Mixed	Counts and invoices take hours each week
Marketing and reviews	Plans campaigns, drafts review replies	Toast IQ Grow; Olo Sentiment	New; parts in beta	You have guest data and no time to use it
Kitchen	Fries, builds bowls, peels avocados	Miso Flippy; Sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen; Chipotle Autocado	Few sites; high monthly cost	One repetitive station runs all day

How does AI answer the phone and take orders?

A phone agent answers the restaurant's number, handles questions about hours and the menu, takes orders and passes some calls to staff. SoundHound's restaurant page says its agents take phone, drive-thru and kiosk orders and connect to the POS.

Maple's published plans are Voice at $150/month billed monthly or $85/month billed yearly, for answering, FAQs and call transfer, and Pro at $350/month billed monthly or $220/month billed yearly, which adds phone orders into a supported POS and reservations.

Check before you buy: place a test order with a required choice and a modifier, and compare it with the ticket that prints. Ask for a person halfway through and see where the call goes. Use the menu preparation worksheet before a trial. Maturity: sold today with published prices. The risk sits in your menu and POS setup, so test both.

Is drive-thru AI ready?

Taco Bell's drive-thru voice AI, built with Omilia, was live in over 890 U.S. restaurants across 38 states in July 2026, Nation's Restaurant News reported. Omilia said its data shows those lanes are on par with or faster than human order-taking.

Other chains have stepped back. McDonald's ended its IBM voice-ordering test in more than 100 restaurants in June 2024.

In September 2026, Burger King said some guests drove off rather than talk to a bot. It is still testing in about 50 to 70 locations and plans an easier way to order from a person. At the same conference, Technomic data showed 23% of consumers find AI drive-thru ordering appealing and 46% find it unappealing.

Check before you buy: how the crew takes back the lane, how a guest asks for a person, and what the order looks like in the POS. Maple's drive-thru unit stands beside the existing speaker post and has a one-press switch back to the crew. It is in early access with a small number of restaurants, priced per unit, with no public price. Maturity: large rollouts exist, and so do reversals. Plan the human fallback first. The phone versus drive-thru guide helps you pick which channel to test first.

What does AI add to a kiosk?

Most kiosks are touch screens. AI shows up as suggestions and as voice. Toast's spring 2026 release added AI-driven add-on suggestions to its Menu Upsells feature across handhelds, kiosks and guest-facing displays.

A voice kiosk lets the guest speak the order and watch the cart build on screen. Maple's kiosk works this way, has a staff-help button on every screen, and is in early access with a small number of restaurants.

Check before you buy: how the kiosk picks out one guest in a loud room, how it handles modifiers, and whether staff can switch the AI off. Maturity: suggestions on touch kiosks ship inside POS products now; voice kiosks are early.

How does AI suggest items in online and app orders?

Olo says its Smart Cross-Sells use AI to suggest items based on order history, the location's menu and what is already in the cart. Its Fall 2025 release lets brands switch on "For You" categories and Local Favorites.

Check before you buy: whether you control which items it can suggest, and whether you can compare orders with and without suggestions. A vendor's own test is a starting point for yours. Maturity: available now in major ordering platforms. Measure your own lift.

Can AI build the staff schedule?

7shifts says it forecasts sales from historical sales and labor data to predict staffing needs, warns about labor-rule problems as you schedule, and lets managers approve shift changes.

Toast made its Toast IQ assistant available to all U.S. customers in October 2025. It answers questions like "Who's working Friday night?" and can adjust a shift's clock-out. Yum Brands' technology chief said in February 2025 that its Byte platform would add AI to help franchisees schedule labor and forecast.

Check before you buy: how many weeks of sales the forecast needs, how it treats holidays and local events, and whether it flags your local labor rules. Maturity: forecast-based scheduling is widely sold. A manager still signs off.

Does AI inventory counting work?

Starbucks ran the clearest public test. In September 2025 it rolled out NomadGo's camera-based counting to company-owned stores. Baristas scanned shelves with a tablet, and Starbucks said those stores counted inventory eight times as often.

In May 2026 Starbucks ended the program. Reuters had reported that it miscounted and mislabeled products, and Starbucks moved to a single process for all counts.

Toast's spring 2026 release added AI invoice scanning, in beta for Toast Retail, which pulls invoice details into receiving.

Check before you buy: run the AI count and a hand count side by side for several weeks and compare them item by item. Ask how it handles items it cannot see or read. Maturity: mixed. The largest public rollout ended within a year.

Can AI run marketing and review replies?

Toast launched Toast IQ Grow in May 2026. It pairs a Marketing Agent, in beta, that plans email, SMS and social campaigns for slow shifts with a human Marketing Success Manager. Toast bundles it with its other marketing tools for $499/month.

Olo's Sentiment product suggests replies to guest reviews so staff edit a draft instead of writing each reply.

Check before you buy: who approves each campaign or reply before it goes out, what guest data it uses, and how it counts the sales it takes credit for. Maturity: new, and parts are in beta.

Which kitchen jobs are robots doing?

Miso rents its next-generation Flippy fry station for $5,400 per month with no upfront cost, it said in January 2025. White Castle began piloting it in late 2024.

A Miso filing showed Flippy in 13 restaurants across White Castle and Jack in the Box in early 2025, Restaurant Dive reported, against White Castle's 2022 plan for 100.

Sweetgreen's automated Infinite Kitchen runs in more than 20 Sweetgreen locations. Sweetgreen sold Spyce, the unit that built it, to Wonder in December 2025 and keeps using the machines under a supply agreement.

Chipotle began testing Autocado and a Hyphen bowl line in September 2024, each in one California restaurant. It gave no update on either on its April 2026 earnings call, Restaurant Dive noted.

Check before you buy: the monthly cost against the hours the station runs, who cleans and restocks it, and what the crew does when it stops. Maturity: in real kitchens, but at few sites and at a high monthly cost.

Where should a restaurant start?

1. Pick the job that costs you the most staff time or lost orders each week.
2. Ask each vendor for a trial on your own menu, POS and busiest hours.
3. Write down how staff take over when the AI cannot finish.
4. Count results against your current process: orders completed, orders needing staff help and requests not completed.
5. Expand only after the trial numbers hold up.

If missed calls are the problem, the Maple phone ordering page sets out the trial steps from call to kitchen.

Published by Maple. This AI-assisted guide combines vendor pages, company press releases and trade news reports into a task-by-task summary. The maturity ratings are editorial judgments. It does not report a test we ran or promise any result from these tools.