Alex Ilyash, co-founder and CEO of Choice. Credit: Choice Restaurants are no longer just places where people go to enjoy a meal. They have become full businesses and ecosystems, with cooking as only one part of what they do. As our habits and the way we make choices have changed, including where we eat, restaurants have had to adapt to keep up.<\/p>\n
Working in a restaurant, actually on both sides of the business, I can say that most independent restaurants\u2019 marketing, data, and software get handled after the last table leaves, if they\u2019re handled at all. And most of them can\u2019t afford to hire separate teams and people in different roles, like marketing and hospitality consultants. And even though this industry has seen growing interest in going digital and automating as many tasks as possible to offer the best client experience, it is still hard to keep everything together. That said, some places still check and close bookings by hand: the till comes from one vendor and the reservations system from another, and the customer data that should explain who keeps coming back sits scattered across both.<\/p>\n
Choice, the Prague-founded restaurant platform that raised a $7.1M Series A in March, wants AI to take over that late shift. The company is rebuilding its product as Choice AI, a layer that can answer questions about a restaurant and make changes inside it directly, from menu prices and settings to marketing campaigns. Choice AI connects to the tools on Choice\u2019s restaurant platform, from menus and reservations to marketing and reviews. Basically, they are bringing a new colleague to your team who is faster, and you don\u2019t need to sweat it or learn what it does or how. \u201cRestaurants don\u2019t need to know how to do anything on the platform,\u201d Alex Ilyash, Choice\u2019s co-founder and CEO, told me in an interview. \u201cThey just say what they need, and the AI sets it up for them in the background.<\/p>\n
Requests can be written in Romanian or any other language, not only English.\u201d Ten tools and no time The problem Choice is targeting is less a lack of software than a surplus of it. A single venue can run ten separate products just to keep one guest journey working: a point-of-sale system that may date back decades, a payment provider, a reservations platform, a separate SMS marketing tool, and the integrations that hold them together. Staff often push back from day one because nobody on the floor has time to learn another dashboard. \u201cThere are a lot of platforms with a lot of functionality, but the question is whether the restaurant actually needs all of it, and how to make it simple to use,\u201d Ilyash said. Choice itself bundles ordering, QR menus and payments, reservations, loyalty, and delivery marketplace integrations, and sits on top of existing tills rather than replacing them.<\/p>\n
With Choice AI, an owner can ask why sales dropped, which dishes sell together, or which delivery areas bring in the most orders, and get the answer from the restaurant\u2019s own data instead of an exported spreadsheet. A single request can also set off several actions at once. An owner can ask Choice to raise burger prices by 5% and set up a weekend promotion, and the system finds the products, updates the menus and website, and prepares the campaign in one go. When a menu item fails to sync with the POS, the system finds the closest match and fixes it, rather than pointing the owner to a settings page. \u201cChoice should increasingly act like a manager that takes ownership of the task, not another assistant telling somebody else what needs to be done,\u201d Ilyash said.<\/p>\n
The bigger saving is in people. A chain has marketing managers, developers, CRM specialists, and analysts; an independent usually has an owner who is also covering the pass. Outside agencies rarely close the gap, Ilyash said, because they know little about hospitality, and every brief turns into back-and-forth. \u201cRestaurants are sometimes struggling even to make a profit margin,\u201d he said. \u201cIf technology can help them not spend money on external marketing agencies and developers, it helps them actually start making a profit.\u201d The waiter who remembers your wine, isn\u2019t that nice? Data is where the business gets delicate, as guests have grown warier of handing over personal details to book a table, and many would rather phone someone they know at the restaurant. \u201cYes, it may be scary that someone will know what you order, how often you go, what you\u2019re drinking,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if the customers get some benefit from it, maybe they will be happier.\u201d The benefit Choice is betting on is the oldest in hospitality: recognition.<\/p>\n
Choice AI reads a guest\u2019s past orders, notes, and reviews and leaves floor staff a short brief, flagging a shrimp allergy, say, or a complaint about slow service last time. Choice AI turns a guest\u2019s orders, reviews, and feedback into tags and notes for restaurant staff. Done well, the same data lets a waiter remember the white wine you ordered on your last visit. Ilyash has his own version. \u201cI don\u2019t like coriander.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not an allergy, but sometimes I forget to mention it, and they bring me the food with coriander,\u201d he said. \u201cI would be glad if restaurants already knew this.\u201d Indeed, working on both sides of a restaurant, I can definitely say that data and information are king for a restaurant to offer human-friendly service every time you go there for dinner. It is not only about having as much information as possible about your restaurant; rather, it is about knowing your clients and making them comfortable. In the end, everyone goes to a restaurant not just to eat, but to be spoiled with attention. \u201cSince Covid, there has been very little genuinely good news for restaurant operators,\u201d Ilyash said. \u201cAI can take away part of the digital workload while giving restaurants a much deeper connection with their guests.\u201d The same goes for marketing, as owners can ask the system to win back guests who haven\u2019t visited in 60 days, or to find everyone who orders tequila or vegetarian burgers, and it builds the segment and drafts the campaign via email, SMS, WhatsApp, or push notification. Fully automated marketing, retention campaigns that run on their own, and direct publishing to Facebook and Instagram are still on the roadmap.<\/p>\n
Choice is also pitching a European fit, as much of the hospitality software used by Europe\u2019s upmarket restaurants was designed in the US, for large venues with dedicated staff, and adapted to GDPR and local habits afterwards. \u201cThe infrastructure is fragmented, but the problems are surprisingly universal,\u201d Ilyash said, pointing to the different POS, payment, delivery, and fiscal systems a restaurant meets in Prague, Lisbon, or Milan. Getting found by chatbots Delivery platforms opened valuable new demand, but they also pulled discovery, ordering, and the conversation with the guest away from the restaurant itself. Another interesting thing is that Choice is reworking the websites it hosts so that large language models can read them. Owners describe their signature dishes and the neighbourhoods where they want to be found, and the system turns the answers into FAQ pages and descriptions built for AI search.<\/p>\n
Travellers increasingly ask ChatGPT where to eat in a new city, Ilyash said, and \u201cthe marketplace apps are starting to not be so important.\u201d Reviews feed the same strategy, because AI assistants lean on social proof. Choice prompts guests for feedback after a reservation or QR payment, and Ilyash described a flow in which positive reviews go to Google, while negative ones go to the restaurant to be answered. Google\u2019s Maps content policy prohibits businesses from discouraging negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones. Choice now counts more than 9,000 paying restaurants and over 30,000 registered, handling more than two million orders worth about $50 million a month, up from 7,000 paying customers and 1.5 million monthly ord<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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