What Restaurant Operators Actually Need from AI

Somewhere in the last 18 months, a question started showing up in your company’s board meetings, in QBRs, in emails from an executive who’d just come back from a conference: What is our AI strategy? You leave with an action item and an inbox that won’t stop growing. Your POS has an IQ. Your delivery platform has an AI merchant suite. Your loyalty vendor just announced agentic capabilities. Every partner you have is racing to get “AI” somewhere in their product name. Most of it is noise. Not because AI isn’t real or the intent isn’t genuine, but because there’s a wide gap between announcing AI capabilities and actually deploying them against the problems your teams face every day. The industry is, by and large, still in the planning stage, even as the press releases say otherwise. As Olo’s Chief Operating Officer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can both apply AI internally and use AI tools to drive incremental traffic and make life easier for our customers. I’m not writing this to add to the noise, but because the AI story that matters for your business is the one most vendors haven’t been telling. They’re busy announcing, while we’re busy delivering.