Restaurant Automation
Restaurant automation that actually ships. No 12-month roadmap.
We automate the workflows bleeding hours and revenue from your restaurant. Inside your existing Gmail, WhatsApp, and booking tools. First live system in 14 days without replacing your POS.
01
The four restaurant automations that actually move revenue
1. Booking inquiry responder (highest ROI)
An AI script inside your existing Gmail reads each reservation inquiry as it arrives, checks availability from your booking source, and drafts a personalised reply for manager approval. Average response time drops from 18 to 48 hours to under 12 minutes. A London hospitality group running this system saw conversion improve from 31 percent to 58 percent on 40 weekly inquiries. It paid for itself in under 3 weeks.
2. Review response monitor
Google reviews, TripAdvisor, and OpenTable reviews each need a fast, on-brand response. An AI monitor flags new reviews, classifies sentiment, drafts a response in your voice, and routes it for approval. For a group with 8 venues this cuts review management from 3 hours a week to 20 minutes.
3. WhatsApp qualification flow
WhatsApp Business inquiries arrive unfiltered. A qualifier flow asks five questions, distinguishes serious group bookings from casual availability checks, and routes confirmed leads straight to the right team member. Works in any language your customers use. Integrates with your existing WhatsApp Business account without migration.
4. Re-engagement and loyalty sequences
Post-visit emails, lapsed-customer recovery, birthday and anniversary triggers. All built inside Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or Gmail. Not a new CRM. Not a new platform. A set of automated sequences inside the tools your team already uses.
02
Why most restaurant automation fails before it ships
Restaurant automation fails for one reason more than any other: it asks the restaurant to change its stack before the automation starts. Replace the POS. Migrate to a new booking platform. Move the team from Gmail to a new inbox. These are non-starters for an independent restaurant or a group where the front-of-house manager owns the workflow.
“I looked at five restaurant AI tools. They all want me to replace my POS. That is not happening.”
“We are paying for OpenTable, Resy, a CRM, and a review management tool. None of them talk to each other.”
The second failure mode is complexity that arrives before value. A 12-month automation roadmap looks comprehensive on a Keynote slide. It does not look comprehensive when the restaurant is still waiting for the first live system in month four.
We build inside your existing stack. The first system ships in 14 days. It runs in production. Your team uses it Monday morning. You see the change in your response time and conversion numbers before we propose the second system.
Read the full picture in our AI for restaurants overview or in our section on what restaurant automation actually means.
03
What the numbers look like after the first system ships
Response time: 38 hours to 12 minutes. Conversion: 31 percent to 58 percent. ROI timeline: under 3 weeks.
Those are the numbers from the London hospitality group we worked with across 8 venues and 22 staff. They were losing a quarter of their reservation inquiries to a shared inbox that nobody owned after 6pm. We built a Gmail-side responder. The team approved every reply before it sent. Nothing changed about the workflow except the drafting step disappeared.
Two covers per inquiry at £180 average spend on 40 inquiries per week: that is the revenue line. When 27 percent more of those inquiries convert, the quarterly engagement cost is not a line item. It is a rounding error in the quarterly revenue.
This is what AI consulting for small businesses looks like when it is scoped correctly. Not a transformation programme. Not a 40-page roadmap. A working system in your inbox, live on Monday morning.
04
Pricing
Fixed monthly. No percentage of revenue. No per-table fee.
Foundation
£2k
per month
- →Booking flow and inbox audit
- →One automation shipped per quarter
- →Monthly working session
- →Async support
Growth
£3.5k
per month
- →Everything in Foundation
- →Two automations shipped per quarter
- →Weekly working sessions
- →Conversion and response time tracking
Dominance
£5k
per month
- →Everything in Growth
- →Continuous shipping across all revenue workflows
- →Embedded inside your team
- →Capped at three clients per quarter
05
Frequently asked questions
What tasks can be automated in a restaurant?
The highest-value automation targets in a restaurant are the workflows that bleed hours or revenue every day. Reservation inquiry responses: most restaurants take 18 to 48 hours to reply to email inquiries. A responder inside your existing Gmail can draft a reply in under a minute for manager approval. Review responses: Google, TripAdvisor, and OpenTable reviews require a fast branded reply. An AI monitor drafts the response, you approve. Re-engagement campaigns: lapsed customers, birthday sequences, post-visit follow-ups built inside the email tool you already use. Availability checking: a script that reads your booking platform and confirms availability without the manager touching a keyboard.
Does restaurant automation reduce staff?
Not the way we build it. Every system we ship has a human approval step. The Gmail responder drafts a reply; the manager sends it. The review monitor drafts a response; the owner approves it. Automation in our model means the manual labour of composing a reply from scratch disappears. The decision to send still belongs to your team. The effect is not fewer staff but less time per task. A booking manager who spent three hours a day in the inbox now spends 20 minutes reviewing AI drafts.
How long does it take to automate a restaurant?
The first live system ships in 14 to 21 days from kickoff. That is a working production system inside your existing inbox or WhatsApp, not a pilot. Most engagements ship two to four systems in the first quarter: inbox responder, WhatsApp qualifier, review monitor, re-engagement sequences. By month three the restaurant has a working automation layer across its main revenue workflows without having added a single new platform to the stack.
Will this work with our existing booking system?
Yes. We build around your existing stack, not against it. OpenTable, Resy, Google Calendar, ResDiary, a spreadsheet: we have worked with all of them. The availability check reads whatever source your team maintains. We do not ask you to migrate to a new platform. If your team lives in OpenTable, the system reads OpenTable.
How much does restaurant automation cost?
A fractional engagement runs £2k to £5k per month. Foundation (£2k) ships one system per quarter. Growth (£3.5k) ships two. Dominance (£5k) is continuous shipping with embedded support. For context: a London hospitality group we worked with paid £10,500 for a quarter and recovered that cost in under 3 weeks from the improvement in reservation conversion. The alternative, an agency retainer for email marketing alone, typically starts at £4k per month before any AI work begins.
Related
Ship the first automation this month.
30 minutes on Zoom or Telegram. We audit your inbox and booking flow, find the workflow bleeding the most revenue, and tell you whether we can automate it in 14 days.
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