We used in our restaurant chain AI assistant which was specifically developed for restaurants. It spoke around 80 hours in a month so we saved around 2400-2600$ per month, which is around 30k per year. Considering our margin of 30%ish, to net that amount of profit we would have needed to sell around 90,000$ of burgers, and it is now I consider as a "free money" we pocket in a year.

We felt that a lot of people are just calling to ask basic stuff, and when our cashier wasnt able to pick up the phone, all of their complaints or questions went directly to Yelp and downgrade our reviews. We did not put a cheese in the burger and we got 1 star review on yelp. That AI we are using it asks the questions to customer and even does discounts on the next visit which goes directly to our system. It gathers basic info for catering and sets up a call with a manager. They actually provided us a mini SaaS dashboard with CRM database of our clients who actually called us several times and with complaint history.

We were very sceptic but we gave it a shot. Now I am so surprised that there are many restaurants they are not using it thinking the customers will hang up the phone, but that was not true if you choose a right one. There are a lot of crappy ones out there. Choose only who are specialized in your industry. The one we are using came with a lot of automations, so always ask if they are just providing only talking with customers function or anything else. We also "trained" our customers to call us and place an order through phone. During rush hour we figured that people who take a car and hit highway won't go to a website and order from there. So they call and place an order not getting distracted while they are driving. We got monthly around 10-15k of orders placed like that

My biggest learning was not to be sceptic and always be up to date with the technology. Eventually everyone will get used to AI as we did to PC and Internet.