Kiosks generate stronger sales. But do they drive some customers away? | Photo: Shutterstock.
The restaurant industry in 2025 is more tech-enabled than it has ever been. Operators have spent the past few years upgrading their loyalty programs, taking advantage of one-to-one marketing. They have digital menu boards that can change based on the weather. Kiosks are commonplace. Now they’re doing things like using AI to count inventory.
And yet it’s difficult to see, exactly, where this is taking everybody. Because it sure isn’t helping generate more traffic. It may, in fact, be costing the industry traffic.
Restaurant industry traffic has remained weak over the past few years after initially surging after the pandemic. Today, the average chain restaurant has 7% fewer occasions than it did in 2019. All the industry’s growth came from either its generally modest unit count expansion coupled with higher prices.
This didn’t appear lost on attendees at the FSTEC conference in Orlando this week. Attendees and speakers talked about “connection” and “hospitality.” Robots were nowhere to be seen. AI was everywhere—but operators still want it to help them take on more mundane tasks.
Some of the most technologically-savvy restaurant chains in the country are finding themselves fighting for customer counts.
Starbucks has the industry’s most successful loyalty program and spent billions after the pandemic to make its cafes more amenable to a tech-savvy, takeout-focused customer. It is now spending massive dollars to reverse much of what it’s done since 2020, such as replacing seats and ending its pickup-only units.
McDonald’s in 2017 began adding kiosks to its restaurants and digital menu boards to its drive-thrus. It has a popular loyalty program. It just lowered prices on what it again calls its Extra Value Meals because it’s concerned about traffic from lower-income consumers.
The brand generating sales and traffic growth? Chili’s, which gets its sales by convincing customers to stay a while and get their food delivered by a real human being.
Restaurants’ digital revolution hasn’t come with any sort of corresponding traffic. We can say for sure that a kiosk generates more sales. We do not know how many customers get frustrated by a kiosk and leave for another location.
Voice-activated AI in the drive-thru is great. But at the end of the day you are still interacting with a software program and not a human being. And there are still major questions about the ability for a large-scale restaurant chain to be able to do this at scale.
The alternate challenge with all this technology is the demand for a return. The private-equity firms running a lot of these restaurant chains want their investments in this technology to pay off. And if that payoff isn’t in the form of higher sales, it is in the form of cost cuts. Any franchisee, restaurant operator or publicly-traded firm will want the same thing.
Restaurant operators have been in a rush to add more technology since the pandemic, with much of that technology focused on takeout. But customers appear to be shifting back to demanding more hospitality with their fries. In-store orders are on the upswing. Casual-dining chains are outperforming fast-casuals.
In shifting so much of this business toward the screen, and away from the human being, perhaps the industry has lost a bit of what makes it great in the first place: The hospitality that supposedly underpins much of what it does.
Technology is great. And restaurants do need to figure out ways to use that technology to improve efficiency. But it should not come at the expense of their humanity.
