The Best AI Tools for Restaurants in 2025
Running a restaurant has never been easy. Between juggling schedules, managing food costs and keeping customers happy, it sometimes feels like you need three extra hands just to get through the week.
Here’s where AI for restaurants come in.
Practical, AI-powered restaurant tools can help owners save money by reducing waste and spotting usage trends. Think of them as the additional team members, who are great at crunching numbers and automating repetitive tasks. They take the nitty-gritty stuff off your plate, while you focus on running your restaurant more efficiently.
In this guide, we’ll cover five of the best AI tools for restaurants in 2025 and how they can help you improve efficiency and profitability in specific areas of your business.
7shifts for Smarter Staff Scheduling
Labor is one of the biggest expenses in any restaurant, and yet schedules are often built on gut feeling. That leads to nights where you’re scrambling to cover tables and others where you’ve got too many people standing around.
7shifts takes the guesswork out of scheduling by using AI to forecast labor needs based on your past sales, weather patterns, and even local events. It helps managers build smarter schedules that cut down on overtime, reduce last-minute shift swaps, and keep service levels consistent.
For restaurant owners, that means tighter labor control and happier staff. And as you know, any improvement in labor costs makes a tangible impact on profitability.
ClearCOGS for Reducing Food Waste
If you’ve ever opened your walk-in and discovered way too much of one ingredient wilting in the back, you know how painful food waste can be. Every spoiled item is money down the drain.
ClearCOGS uses AI inventory forecasting to predict exactly what you’ll need, when you’ll need it. It analyzes sales history, seasonality, and external factors like the weather or upcoming holidays to forecast ingredient demand. That means smarter ordering, less spoilage, and fewer last-minute supplier runs.
Over time, reducing food waste with ClearCOGS can have a major impact on your bottom line.
OpenTable Max for Smarter Reservation Management
No-shows and uneven demand are a constant battle. You might have a packed house on Saturday night but struggle to fill tables on Tuesday.
OpenTable Max applies AI to your reservations, helping you reduce no-shows and spread demand more evenly across shifts. It learns your patterns, nudges guests to book during slower times and optimizes table turnover.
The result? Fuller dining rooms, steadier cash flow and less frustration for your front-of-house staff.
MarginEdge for Sales Forecasting
One of the toughest parts of running a restaurant is getting sales forecasting right. MarginEdge’s AI uses historical sales performance to create actionable forecasts. Its AI engine digests up to three years of your past sales data, capturing growth trends, weekday patterns, and holiday behavior, to deliver a date-by-date prediction of future sales. And because it’s powered by your actual performance, it constantly updates your forecast daily as new sales come in.
It also gives you clear visibility into how you’re pacing versus last period, plus category-level budgets that tie directly to your predicted sales, so you can manage spend with real context.
BentoBox for Driving Repeat Customers
Getting a customer through your doors once is great. Getting them to come back again and again? That’s where the profit is.
BentoBox uses AI to help restaurants build stronger customer relationships. It can personalize email and text campaigns, suggest the right upsell at checkout and make sure your marketing is actually driving return visits.
Instead of relying on “post and pray” social media strategies, you’ll have a tool that turns guest data into repeat business.
GetPlately for Styled Food Photos That Work on Social Media
Getting great food photos is one thing; getting ones that consistently nail your vibe and make people stop scrolling is a whole other beast.
Enter GetPlately, a clever AI tool in the pipeline that could change the game for restaurants. Imagine uploading a quick snapshot of a dish and —boom— it’s auto-transformed into a polished, brand-aligned social media post, complete with stylized visuals and written for appetite appeal.
GetPlately promises to trim hours off your marketing workload and help your feed look curated without the designer bill. It’s still yet to be launched, but we say this one’s worth keeping an eye on.
The Bottom Line on AI Tools for Restaurants
AI isn’t going to run your restaurant for you. But the right restaurant AI tools can make your job easier by cutting waste, saving admin time, and smoothing out the bumps in your daily operations.
Start small.
Try one tool where you feel the most pain, whether that’s scheduling, inventory, or invoices, and see what kind of difference it makes.
If you want help figuring out which tools make sense for your business (and how to connect them back to your books), that’s exactly what we do.
At U-Nique Accounting, we specialize in helping restaurant owners run smarter, more profitable businesses with the right mix of tech and accounting support.
At the end of the day, the less time you spend buried in spreadsheets, the more time you can spend running the kind of restaurant you actually want to run.
By MATT CIANCIARULO
