Restaurants are tired of AI, too Tech vendors have spent the past two or three years injecting more AI into their offerings for various reasons. Walking the vendor marketplace at FSTEC, AI was everywhere, just like last year, and the year before. And yet, as the above data demonstrates, AI has yet to make a real tangible imprint on the industry as a whole. And restaurants are simply tired of hearing about it. AI “is a dirty word right now,” said Joe Yetter, president of PAR Technology’s restaurant division. PAR is one of the many companies reshaping its business around AI. Asked how it plans to sell that technology to a skeptical audience, Yetter said PAR wants to focus less on the AI, and more on the outcomes AI can create. “There’s a number of avenues where we’ve invested in AI, but AI is not the goal in and of itself,” Yetter said. That seems to be how restaurants are approaching the AI overload as well. When assessing potential tech investments, Brinker International CTO Chris Caldwell said the company first starts with the pain points it wants to address and then looks at what technology might be able to solve it. “I think once you really narrow down the use cases that you’re going after, it makes it a little bit easier,” he said. “[You’re not just looking] at all aspects of technology and AI, but at the ones that are really playing in the spaces that you’re trying to solve for.” I should note here that the most impressive piece of technology I saw at FSTEC had zero AI in it. It was the Wingstop Smart Kitchen (supplied by the Perfect Company), a sort of gamified kitchen display system that tells employees exactly what they should be doing and when. It has apparently been working wonders for Wingstop.
Image: Envato
“Once you really narrow down the [AI] use cases that you’re going after, it makes it a little bit easier.” — Chris Caldwell, CTO of Brinker International
Vibe coding is coming Now, while many restaurants say they’re fed up with all the AI talk, AI has also given them an out: With the help of AI coding tools, it’s now possible for operators to build their own technology at a fraction of the cost of buying it from a vendor. In fact, a vendor-hosted workshop at FSTEC showed attendees exactly how to do it: Using Claude, presenters from Revmo AI built an AI “skill” that could take a bar’s inventory based on a picture of bottles on a shelf. “The build versus buy equation has started to shift very much in the favor of building,” said Witt. “That’s putting pressure on vendors, because customers don’t want these bells and whistles.” Though he is bullish on vibe coding, Witt also acknowledged that there are risks involved, particularly when it comes to scaling a homegrown app across a large organization — the kind of thing established tech companies are built for. “It could be easy to get trapped in a bad IT project, which is presumably the thing you’re trying to avoid,” he said.
He added that the best vendors will encourage restaurants to vibe code atop of their platforms by “de-siloing” their data for the operator to use. There is hope All that being said, things aren’t all bad. Nearly 700 operators attended FSTEC this year. That’s nearly 700 people who are interested in investing in tech- nology. There were plenty of success stories to behold on and off the stage. There’s a good chance that AI will be truly transformative, in time. There are still innovative new tech companies to be found and founded. And at the end of the day, there was still a sense that tech — the right tech — can be the answer to a lot of restaurants’ challenges. “Everybody in this marketplace has the coolest technology, right? There’s no doubt about it,” said Chris Padilla, CIO of Dine Brands, during FSTEC’s opening session. “It’s more focused on, as you go and you interact with all the vendors in the marketplace, being crystal clear what outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. … Know those with clarity, and that will guide your decisions.”
6 | FSTEC 2026
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