Artificial ingredients: tasteless. Artificial intelligence (AI) in mobile food ordering: tantalizing.
That’s a silly simplification of the very serious matter of what AI is doing for the restaurant sector, among others, as online ordering becomes a way of life and not just a lockdown relic.
Done in collaboration with Kount, PYMNTS’ November 2020 Mobile Order-Ahead Tracker® dives into the topic in-depth, noting that “artificial intelligence (AI) has been a transformative tool for the restaurant industry in many areas, improving users’ experiences with food service mobile apps while lending businesses valuable data about their customers. Smart machine algorithms have allowed food delivery times to be accelerated, while AI-enabled voice assistants are helping restaurants rapidly fulfill orders. AI is not only being adopted to improve workflows and grow revenues, but has also been enlisted in the fight against fraud.”
As eateries from quick-service restaurants (QSRs) to fast-casual, fast food and even fine restaurants reinvent their processes, touchless smartphone apps have evolved years in a matter of months, catapulting mobile order-ahead (MOA) into a tech-driven future state – and AI is lighting the way.
Advanced AI Makes Systems Smarter
Businesses rapidly embraced digital solutions in 2020 as shopping (and eating) moved online while everyone hid out indoors. The surge of digital orders carried a toxic tide of fraud, and many companies turned to supervised machine learning to deal with it.
Smart move – but supervised machine learning is reliant on historical data, which means that by itself, this method might not catch the new or disguised attack types pouring in.
Vik Dhawan, vice president of products at Kount, told PYMNTS that “[advanced AI] uses both unsupervised and supervised machine learning to detect anomalies in everyday purchases. It uses payment data, location data, unique customer data and digital identifiers to detect fraud in real time. This establishes identity trust or risk in real time. QSRs should employ AI that marries supervised and unsupervised machine learning. Advanced AI means reducing chargebacks, saving inventory, maintaining brand loyalty and spending more time managing the lunch rush than worrying about fraud.”
As the Mobile Order-Ahead Tracker® states, “AI can be leveraged to analyze and tally credit card transactions similar to how banking transactions are examined. The technology enables more intelligent decisions when it comes to identifying and predicting fraud by providing a meta analysis of attacks, allowing QSRs to create fraud profiles and determine where threats may be located. Research suggests that a variety of indicators, such as geolocation, address verification and CVV verification, can help companies pinpoint and reject likely fraud attacks.”
Catering to Individual Tastes at Scale
To illustrate how AI adoption is playing out in the field, the November Mobile Order-Ahead Tracker® contains a deep dive on the efforts of the Colorado-based Boston Market chain.
“I’m very excited about what AI can do for restaurants, and we are looking at how it fits with Boston Market right now,” Chief Marketing Officer Slaton Smith told PYMNTS. “I believe AI is the future of the restaurant sector, and it will help [us] run smoother, sell more and be more profitable.”
He said that AI processes data faster, “allowing restaurants to better tailor their mobile and in-person marketing efforts toward individuals’ tastes. AI tools can even be integrated into digital menu boards to display offerings that are informed by customers’ ordering histories, for example.”
That’s the level of digital engagement users now expect from MOA. “Research indicates that most customers are also on board with these shifts, with a recent survey revealing that 71 percent of consumers are open to QSRs’ and fast-casual restaurants’ efforts to incorporate AI into their operations,” per the new Tracker.
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