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Artificial intelligence is advancing by leaps and bounds and is increasingly present in the gastronomy sector. The latest to join this trend has been 100 Montaditos, from the Restalia group, which has just presented a tool based on Artificial Intelligence that acts as a virtual recommender, offering 100 Montaditos customers a variety of options from its menu based on their tastes.
This virtual tool aims to improve the personalization of customer service, for which it will address four challenges: advertising saturation, queue management, the limited time customers have at the point of sale to place their order and the wide variety of products on the 100 Montaditos menu, according to Restalia’s marketing director, Renzo Quiñones, during the presentation of the innovative project.
“What we have created is a virtual waiter that is available on the customer’s cell phone, that is intelligent, that learns and that knows what the customer wants. At the same time, this tool is intended to support our staff so that they can focus exclusively on customer service,” Quiñones explained.
How this virtual recommender works
Through the development of a proprietary adaptive algorithm, this virtual recommender will suggest a personalized menu based on various parameters entered by the user. In addition, it will ‘educate’ itself based on the overall behavior of all users, as well as individual history. “We believe that with this tool we have solved the challenge of showing the customer all the possibilities of the menu in a fun and innovative way,” added the marketing director.
From this March, the tool will be available in some 100 Montaditos restaurants in Madrid, through a QR code that customers will have at their disposal. Once scanned, the user will be able to specify the number of diners, budget, culinary preferences and even his or her mood at that moment. Based on this data, the AI recommender will generate a personalized order and provide the customer with different combinations to best suit their preferences.
It is expected that throughout April and May, the tool will be implemented in the rest of the 100 Montaditos establishments, and in June it will be extended to the rest of the Restalia group brands.
This is not the only innovation project Restalia is working on. At the same time, it is already developing a second phase – scheduled for September – which will include voice recognition when selecting options, as well as the possibility of ordering and payment from the tool (direct integration with the POS).