that isn’t always happening, which brings us to our next point. Tech isn’t turning the tide According to National Restaurant Association data, restaurants are seeing bottom-line benefits from technology, but not as much as one would like, as my colleague Jonathan Maze wrote recently. In a survey, about 29% of restaurants said that technology reduced corporate overhead, 27% said it reduced labor costs, and 20.4% said it reduced upfront costs. But more than 28% of restaurants said tech had no significant impact on their operating costs, and another 12% said that it had actually increased their costs. That’s 40% that aren’t seeing tech do what it’s supposed to. Even Chad Moutray, the restaurant association’s chief economist and a glass-half-full kind of guy, acknowledged that tech’s impact on costs is “not as high as I would have expected.” This means tech companies need to buckle down, be clear about their ROI, and focus on how they can help restaurants’ bottom line. Consumers don’t like AI In a presentation on AI, author and journalist Stephen Witt high- lighted data from a new Gallup poll showing that just 35% of Amer- icans believe AI will improve their lives. (Worldwide, the sentiment is generally more positive, Gallup found.) Witt tied Americans’ AI discontent to our current K-shaped economy, in which wealthy people are benefiting from a stock market that’s being fueled by AI stocks while everyone else is getting squeezed. “This creates a lot of political resentment of AI,” he said. And that’s just one reason consumers are anti-AI. There are also fears that it’s going to take everyone’s jobs, or, you know, end the world. Needless to say, this is a problem for tech companies selling consumer-facing AI products, such as AI that answers the phone or takes orders in the drive-thru. That’s showing up in survey data, too. According to Technomic, just 23% of consumers find ordering from an AI drive-thru bot appealing, making it the least popular restaurant ordering method. In a panel at FSTEC, Burger King’s VP of IT Chakri Somisetti said the chain is changing its AI drive-thru strategy after finding that some customers will drive away rather than order from a robot. This is part of a larger shift back to more human-centric hospitality at restaurants as the pandemic becomes an ever more distant memory. “There’s been this pretty strong re-emergence of the importance of experience, social occasions, and service,” Shank said. “How can you create that hospitality with a smile when you are building these technologies?”
FSTEC 2026 | 5
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