Lightspeed launches AI-powered tools to ease restaurant operations

Lightspeed Commerce Inc. has launched a suite of AI-powered platforms to eliminate mundane tasks that often bog down retailers and restaurateurs.

“Merchants start businesses out of passion, not because they love spending hours on inventory, reconciliation, or schedules,” Ryan Tabone, chief product and technology officer of Lightspeed, said in a press release. “Our job as their technology partner is to empower them with the tools that simplify how they operate, so they can focus on their customers and scale their business. This latest round of new product features is the start of a string of functionality that gives them that ability, as well as an edge in their respective markets.”

Menu updates
What used to take hours of inputting and updating the POS for menu changes now takes seconds with Lightspeed Restaurant’s Smart Items, which:

• Generates product information.
• Creates images to match.
• Auto translates the menu into multiple languages.

Whether restaurateurs are managing an extensive 100-item menu or starting from scratch, Smart Items can save them valuable time: up to 30 minutes per 100-item menu, or even hours and days for those building content from the ground up, said Tabone, who also pointed out that the company’s proprietary Advanced Insights tool got a powerful boost with two features, including:

• Magic Menu Quadrant, offering merchants insights into popular items and those that encourage repeat dining.
• Staff Performance tools help managers optimize their front-of-house team’s performance, from increasing order sizes to cross-training.

When it comes to seeing these features brought to life, Jarred Drown, owner of Terrace Bay Hotel and Freshwater Tavern in Gladstone, Michigan said that the Magic Menu Quadrant helped him expand while turning a profit on every order.

Francine Joseph, business manager from Boukan in Toronto, Canada, agreed, saying that one of the greatest features they have now is capturing customer data.

“We always encourage our staff to capture, especially our loyal customers, repeat customers because they’re spending money here and what we want to be able to do is reward that,” Joseph said in the release.

Speeding up vertical and target assortment planning
Brands that operate their own retail stores can reduce manual work (and the frequency of data-entry errors) by using NuORDER Assortments to optimize inventory allocation, identify merchandising gaps, and make more informed range planning decisions, Tabone said.

“Implementing NuORDER Assortments meant more accurate roll-ups and a clear process to write smarter buys,” Stephanie Gin, director of Buying at Brunello Cucinelli, said in the release. “We now get an immediate visual of the assortment thus making it much easier to analyze and review. The tool has replaced all manual processes and has become essential to our buying process.”

For multi-brand retailers, NuORDER Assortments allows merchants and brands to load and manage financial or allocation targets, which enables them to compare their assortment against planned spend and makes it easier to see where they are over and under-invested. As they write their units, buyers can review how their totals measure against their targets for different departments, categories or other product groupings.

Additionally, onboarding brands to NuORDER Assortments is self-service, allowing for automated mapping of their product schema into an assortment schema and enabling the brand to configure their setup, according to the release.