The Restaurant Association’s series of AI tips for hospo are practical tips and real-world examples of how artificial intelligence can help you reclaim time, reduce admin, and keep your focus on what matters most: your customers.
Running a hospitality business is a constant balancing act. Between running the business, staff management, supplier emails, marketing, and customer service (and more!) there are never enough hours in the day. That’s why we’ve launched a 12-week series on AI Time Savers for Hospo. Each week we spotlight one small, practical way you can use AI in your business — no jargon, no big budgets, just tools and ideas you can start using straight away.
If you’re new to AI, platforms like Claude.ai or ChatGPT are free to try and can handle many of the tasks we’ll cover in this series.
Check out our Week 1- Week 7 AI Tips for Hospo
Week 1 – What AI Can Do for You
Think of AI as a very fast junior assistant: it won’t always get everything right, but it can take the first pass at jobs that usually eat up your time. This article looks at 3 AI assistants, The Assistant, The Creator, The Strategist.
Week 2 – Your AI Writing Assistant: Customer Communications Made Easy
Turn AI into your customer service copywriter. Use AI to work on one of your most time-consuming tasks: writing customer communications. Whether it’s responding to booking inquiries, handling complaints, or sending follow-up emails, good customer communication takes time to get right. AI excels at getting that tone just right — and doing it in seconds, not minutes.
Week 3 – Menu Engineering Made Simple: Let AI Optimize Your Offerings
Turn AI into your menu consultant. Menu engineering — the art and science of designing your menu for maximum profitability — usually requires spreadsheets, complex calculations, and a lot of guesswork. But AI can analyse your sales data, spot patterns you might miss, and suggest changes that could boost both customer satisfaction and your profit margins.
Week 4 – Your AI training coordinator: staff communication made simple
Turn AI into your staff training and communication assistant. How can AI help with staff communications – keeping your team informed, trained, and on the same page? AI can help you create consistent, clear internal staff communications that save you hours each week and ensure nothing gets lost in translation.
Week 5 – Transform how you attract, screen, and select hospitality talent
When you’re competing for talent in a tight market, spending hours writing job ads that don’t convert, and sifting through applications that don’t match your needs isn’t the best use of your valuable time. We’ve seen candidates are already using AI to write better applications — shouldn’t you be using it to find better staff?
Week 6 – Your AI admin assistant: Smarter supplier and invoice management
Catch costly mistakes and stay on top of supplier changes without the paperwork overwhelm. Price changes you didn’t notice until after you’d paid the invoice. Delivery discrepancies that cost you (or missing items). Admin tasks like tracking supplier changes and checking invoices aren’t glamorous — but we all know how important the tasks are. AI can help you stay on top of supplier management without it taking over your day.
Week 7 – Your AI rostering assistant: smarter schedules in half the time
Turn your time-consuming admin task into a 15-minute job. While AI can’t build your roster automatically (yet), it can do some of the heavy thinking that makes rostering so time-consuming — analyzing patterns, suggesting optimisations, and flagging problems.