For years, the restaurant phone was a fixed cost of doing business: someone had to answer it, and answering it often meant pulling a manager away from the floor at exactly the moment they were needed most. At Food & Hospitality Week Sydney’s Tech Stage session on smart bookings, a panel of operators and technology providers made the case that this is no longer a given, and that the shift is changing not just how venues take bookings, but what floor staff actually spend their time doing.
The data hiding in the call log
Before Edition Hospitality (the group behind Nomad Sydney, Ren, Laureau and Florentino) brought AI reservations on board, Operations Director Sian Potsig started by simply listening to what the phones were already telling them.
“We started monitoring phone calls to see you know when we were missing them phone calls when people did call in,” Potsig said. “You’d be surprised how many people try and make a booking at 1 a.m. We did have some missed calls at that time.”
The audit also revealed two predictable pressure points during service hours. “What we learned is our busy times are, you know, between 12 and 1. That’s when people are on their lunch break. That’s when they want to call you up and make a booking,” she said. The second spike came later in the day, at precisely the moment staff could least afford the interruption. “Between five and six, what we realised there is people would call the venue, and whilst we want our managers focusing on the guests, they’d be busy picking up the phones because it’s just people who are running late.”
That single insight, that managers should be greeting guests, not fielding calls about a table running ten minutes behind, became the justification for automating the phone line. “We trained the AI to, you know, pick up the phone, and the guests could tell the AI agent, ‘Hey, we’re running late,’ and you know, it’d mark it on their booking,” Potsig said. “Our staff wouldn’t need to answer the phone, so it just really became efficient for how our restaurants are running at the minute.”
From order-taker to order-maker
For smaller operators, the same technology is being asked to do considerably more than take a booking. Karl Schlothauer, owner-operator of House of Pocket and precinct coordinator for YCK Laneways and the Terrigal Esplanade, described the reality of running a venue where staff don’t start until mid-afternoon. “Staff don’t start until 3 p.m. in the afternoon, and then they’ve got one hour where they’ve got emails and phone calls to get back to, and then the phones don’t get answered from then onwards,” he said.
That gap is now filled by an AI receptionist Schlothauer has named Muriel, and he’s used the opening to push it well beyond reservations. “Can it also market to the people when they’re calling up? Can it tell them about the live music events? Can it tell them what our specials were? 30% of our business is from the people that come in are only booking, so I was more excited of how I could tweak it to suit our business,” he said. Callers now hear about the venue’s bottomless brunch offer, can request a follow-up text, and are even directed there from social media when no one is free to respond. “We use it on our Instagram as well. So when there’s someone not manning the Instagram, they’ll get a thing saying, ‘Why don’t you just ring our AI?’ and they might be able to answer things for you.”
Session moderator Sarah Franklyn, Head of Partnerships at Impact Data, summed up the shift neatly: Schlothauer, she said, has “turned it from an order taker to an order maker.”
What this actually frees up
Paddy McCrory, Chief Revenue Officer at Now Book It, framed the broader opportunity in terms of consistency as much as coverage. An AI phone assistant, he said, is “someone from your venue who knows your venue intimately, at any point, day or night,” one that can “talk about your dietary requirements,” “talk about what you offer for functions and send you links to fill out inquiries,” and transfer a call to accounts if needed. The pitch isn’t that it replaces hospitality’s human touch, but that it removes the parts of the job nobody wanted anyway: chasing a late table, repeating the same functions script for the fifth time that week, or missing a booking altogether because no one was near the phone at 1am.
Potsig was careful to note that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all rollout. Edition uses AI reservations in its more casual venues, but not in its fine-dining rooms. “The people that come there, you know they’re spending a lot of money and they want that more personal touch,” she said. “We know that’s not going to work for that demographic.”
The takeaway for operators
The panel’s shared advice for venues considering the move was less about the technology itself and more about starting with an honest look at where staff time is actually going. For Edition, that meant a call log audit before a single tool was chosen. For House of Pocket, it meant recognising a staffing gap and deciding, deliberately, how much personality and marketing to load into the fix.
The common thread: the most useful place to start isn’t asking what AI can do, but asking what your floor staff are doing that a guest never actually needed a person for.
This article is based on insights shared during a panel discussion featuring Paddy McCrory, Chief Revenue Officer at Now Book It; Sian Potsig, Operations Director at Edition Hospitality; Karl Schlothauer, owner-operator of House of Pocket and precinct coordinator for YCK Laneways; and Sarah Franklyn, Head of Partnerships at Impact Data.
