Is Agentic AI the Future of Restaurant Efficiency?

The real value of agentic AI is in giving restaurant operators and their teams more time to focus on hospitality.

“Restaurant operators need to understand that Agentic AI is not about micromanaging employees or simply identifying what is going wrong,” explained Lianne Bradley, Director, Restaurants for Solink. The more context AI has, such as data from POS, labor, inventory, customer traffic, and video data, the more effectively it can support the business.”

Rather than reviewing every transaction, shift, or customer interaction manually, AI can continuously monitor operations, identify the moments that require attention, and surface only the most important insights, she noted. This allows AI to act as an extra layer of support for the team. It can help protect the business, identify potential risks, and flag operational issues, while employees and managers stay focused on serving customers and leading their people.

Agentic AI reviews video feeds and data, reasons through it, and only flags humans for what genuinely matters. For example, one client used agentic AI to identify when they have a spill in the kitchen and it is not cleaned up within a certain period of time to avoid any slip and fall incidents, Bradley said. Before, they only found out when an employee was hurt, but now they can take preventative actions. 

“Traditional systems have a limited scope for what they can identify and action. Most operators run on disconnected systems, so there's no unified view across the business, no way to get notified in real time, and no context to understand what's actually happening when something does surface.”

Preventing Food Waste and Inventory Loss

Because food waste is a huge cost for restaurants, one restaurant brand is using agentic AI to determine if their late night team is putting too many burgers on the grill, which leads to poor food quality or waste, she said. 

“Minimizing waste near closing time is a clear case where video-only AI already delivers real value. Operators want to avoid overcooking food that won't sell before they shut down for the night, since anything left on the grill past that point is a direct loss. We've seen this play out directly with customers using it to time their last cook of the night more accurately.”

Agentic AI can also be used to prevent inventory loss by cross-referencing POS records with video, catching things like manager meals, voids and comps that were never justified, Bradley noted. It also catches inventory loss that has nothing to do with theft, like a fridge running warm and spoiling the product before anyone notices. 

“Both are areas where the POS data alone looks clean, and the video alone looks unremarkable, but together they reveal losses in real-time.”

Enhancing Brand Standards

AI agents be used to enforce brand standards for multi-unit locations because they can be trained on what to look for such as checking that employees are in proper uniform, service times are being met, health and safety protocols are being followed, stores are opening and closing on time, or that customers are greeted at the door, Bradley said. 

“For owners running multiple brands, this also makes it possible to benchmark performance across all of them automatically across unique standards instead of relying on manual spot checks. When something goes amiss from the brand standard, the manager or owner can get an alert right away and support coaching initiatives with video examples directly from the platform.”

Being there are so many parts of restaurant operations where owners still have zero visibility, we are currently seeing the tip of the iceberg for Agent AI use in restaurant operations, Bradley believes. 

“Custom agents can be built around almost any question as long as the video and data exist to support it. Most of our best ideas come directly from what customers bring to us.”