The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition

Such data are handy for restaurants trying to optimise inventories and staffing levels to capitalise on big events. Toast’s chief marketing officer, Kelly Esten, says the firm wants to take its number-crunching further, and use artificial intelligence not just in the storerooms and kitchen, but in the dining area, too. Toast is toying with adding transcription software to the hand-held gadgets that waiters use to record orders and take payments, so that they can keep buttering up customers with fewer distractions. She thinks cameras around the dining room could help alert workers to customers’ needs. Automated records and face recognition…