Abstract
The restaurant technology market is rapidly evolving and is transforming the restaurant business as a significant sector of tourism and hospitality. Enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), mobile apps, kiosks and chatbots revolutionize the guest experience and robots automate restaurant operations. Despite the increasing interest, the use of AI and robotics in restaurants is still in its early stage and restaurant managers are seeking guidance to leverage these technologies for service excellence. In this high-contact service sector, emotional skills need to be balanced with the possible automation potentials. The present research analyzes the current state of AI and robotics in the restaurant sector and proposes a systematic identification of process innovation potentials. For this purpose, a market analysis of the European AI and robotics market for restaurant operations is conducted, which yields a first knowledge base for future research and conceptual work. Besides detailed empirical data, a reference process is developed for leveraging new technologies for process innovation.
Highlights
The restaurant technology market is rapidly evolving and transforms the restaurant business as a significant sector of tourism and hospitality
artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are perceived as key value drivers
Restaurateurs must be aware of the capabilities of AI and robotics technologies in substituting this human work and need to carefully decide how to deploy innovative technologies in their daily business processes
Summary
The restaurant technology market is rapidly evolving and transforms the restaurant business as a significant sector of tourism and hospitality. Even if research demonstrates the potential of AI and robotics for all human tasks in service operations (Frey and Osborne 2017; Huang et al 2019), a quantitative view on existing technologies is missing to fully understand their capabilities, in a high-contact service sector This applies to the European restaurant sector where an empirical analysis of the European AI and robotics vendors shall offer insights to accumulate knowledge for conceptual work from a practical perspective. Recent research proposes that the ability to deliver emotional, hedonic and utilitarian aspects will be critical for robots to be successfully integrated into the service delivery process (Lu et al 2020; Rosete et al 2020) For this reason, academic literature emphasizes the need for future research that focuses on the deployment of AI and intelligent robots adopting emotional work in the hospitality sector (Ivanov et al 2019; Lu et al 2020)
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