Transforming Restaurants With AI: Enhancing the Guest Experience with Alex Sambvani (Ep 229)
How can AI revolutionize your restaurant’s guest experience? In this episode, Jaime Oikle talks with Alex Sambvani from Slang.ai about how their voice-powered AI technology is helping restaurants improve efficiency and customer service. From handling reservations to answering common questions, Slang.ai’s solution allows restaurants to automate over 50% of their phone calls while enhancing the guest experience with human-like interaction. Discover how this innovative platform is helping operators reduce missed calls, capture more business opportunities, and streamline operations—all without replacing staff.
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Transforming Restaurants With AI: Enhancing the Guest Experience with Alex Sambvani
Coming up on this episode of the Running Restaurants Podcast, I get with Alex Sambvani, Co-founder and CEO of Slang.ai. Really cool stuff as we talk about how Alex and his team are helping restaurants with voice-powered AI to more effectively and efficiently answer questions, take reservations, and serve customers better. Alex, tell me a bit about the company, and we'll dig in from there.
Slang.ai
Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Slang is a restaurant voice AI platform. We help restaurants use voice AI to answer their phone calls more effectively. We work with over a thousand operators all over the US. We're live in 47 states. We work with high-end multi-unit operators, all the way down to independents of all kinds. The reason why our technology has been valuable for operators is that it's just so hard to run a restaurant these days, obviously. A lot of phone calls go missed, so most restaurants miss over 50% of their phone calls, a lot of phone calls go to voicemail, and AI is getting pretty good these days.
You can actually have an AI that can answer your phone. It sounds human-like. It's not like, "Press one for this, press two for that." It's like, “Hey Alex, what can I help you with today?” It sounds more hospitable. We actually started this company because we believe that AI can help operators deliver a better guest experience than they can with just their staff. Our philosophy is not that AI should replace humans, it's really that AI should assist humans in delivering better service. That's how we think about things. It can answer common questions like, "What time do you close today?" "Where are you located?" "What's your pet policy?"
It can also manage reservations from end to end, so you can book, modify, and cancel reservations all directly via voice AI without needing your staff involved at all, which means that we can automatically handle over +50% of your phone calls. We know for a fact that, for full-service restaurants, about 60% of the phone calls are related to reservations management, and we just launched a partnership with OpenTable that has an integration into OpenTable. We can attack that 60%, help you automate a lot of those in a way that your guests are actually satisfied with, which has been really exciting.
Pain Points
Good, you hit a lot of stuff, and we'll come back to some of those things for sure. The phrase that's been coming up in a lot of my recent podcasts is pain points. You guys are hitting one, for sure, with a hammer, the fact that the phone doesn't get answered. That's the most annoying thing. I wonder if that's the nexus of how you got started, like, let's solve that problem. Let's get it answered in time, and then let's answer all those basic questions that keep coming up. Let's go back to that phrase, pain points, for a second. What else are you finding that you didn't already hit on that people weren’t doing successfully on the phones?
It's a few things. I think it really falls into three buckets. One is just efficiency. Everyone's trying to get more efficient these days, streamline their labor costs, do more with less, and the phone is just a really inefficient channel to manage as an operator. You get a lot of those common questions that are a waste of time for your staff, but at the same time, there are some really valuable guest calls that are coming through the phone. That gets to the second piece, which is missed opportunities. That's a pain point as well. If you know every phone call could be a six-top reservation, or it could be a private dining reservation, or even a full buyout of your restaurant, or a big catering order, if you're missing those phone calls, you're missing those opportunities. That guest is probably just going to call another restaurant.
If you're missing those phone calls, you're missing those opportunities.
The last is guest experience. We've all experienced this, calling a restaurant and going straight to voicemail sucks, like it pisses you off or if you call, you're running late for your reservation and you want to just give them a heads-up, and they don't answer, you just feel trapped. That's not a good guest experience. That's another pain point. Operators know it's a bad guest experience to go to voicemail or not get an answer when you reach out. It's not hospitality. They're open to technology solutions that can help solve that.
I like being polite. If I'm running late, if I'm just stuck in traffic and I'm ten minutes late and I don't want the restaurant to just give up my spot, personally I want to call and say, "Hey, I'm stuck in traffic, I'm ten minutes late, I'm on my way," because I know, in restaurants and other places, whether it's medical, retail, whatever, there's no-shows. You hit on one that is bigger than I was thinking about initially, that missed opportunity call, the one that is the catering order that is giant.
It could be a wedding outing, it could be a graduation. Those are big-ticket items. If I'm the one making the call for the day, like for example, it's 11:00 my time and I'm making those calls, if I don't get the answer, I move on to the next restaurant right away, like fast, because I’m here to solve a problem. I'm not waiting a week to solve that. I've got a graduation dinner, I want to pick the place. I want to nail it down. That could be worth a thousand bucks to a restaurant or more.
A hundred percent. It's so true. I just went through this myself. It was my birthday last weekend, and I just rented out a small private room for my friends, and I reached out to six restaurants, only three got back to me. The three that I was talking to, it took like two days to get even a simple answer out of them, just to book the private room, and it was not a small check for them. It just shows that there's a lot of inefficiency in the way that these types of communications are handled, and AI can really help. Nobody hates leaving money on the table, so all these operators would love to capture that revenue, they're just struggling to deal with everything that they have to deal with, and so things fall by the wayside.
Good example there, and happy birthday, by the way. Hopefully, it already happened. Did dinner already happen?
Thank you. It happened. It was great. It was actually a dinner at first, and then we pivoted to a brunch. I just turned 34, and so I'm like daytime party mode.
Open Table
That's a key example. That's a lot of money that folks are leaving on the table. Reservations, another big piece of it. You recently did a deal with OpenTable...Talk about what that looks like.
Definitely. We're super excited about our partnership with OpenTable that we just announced on September 12. In less than a month we've already had hundreds of operators using our new integration with OpenTable. It's a partnership that we're really using to push the boundaries of what you can do with voice AI, and we're innovating on the guest experience. What it does is it empowers any restaurant on OpenTable to instantly connect to Slang. What that does is allow any guest to call your restaurant and then be able to book, modify, or cancel a reservation from end to end, all using AI, all using a human-like voice AI experience. That means that 60% of calls related to reservations management can be handled by AI, which is huge. That's a huge load off of your team.
Just think about how many phone calls your team's probably fielding about just changing the party size or changing the time or booking a new reservation. There's so much time savings there, and the guests also love it because the phone's actually being answered, the AI works, and they're getting the thing done that they want, whether it's book, modify, or cancel. The integration and partnership is live in the U.S. and Canada. We're super excited about it. There's another thing that I’ll share that we're working on as well. On top of this integration is a feature called cross-selling. If you're a multi-unit operator and you have multiple units in a city and a guest calls one location that's on OpenTable and there's no availability, our AI will automatically try and get that guest to go to a sister unit. That guest stays within your network. There's a lot more coming, but we're super excited.
Behind The AI
Good stuff there. You could take this in any direction, why restaurants?
It's a good question. We actually didn't start in restaurants. When we first started the company, we were a horizontal solution. We were everything for everyone, and the very first thing that we built was actually for my aunt, who's a hair salon owner. The reason why we started the company, or we focused on the phone initially, is because I had lunch with my aunt one day, and she was complaining about how hard it is for hairstylists to answer the phone. She misses calls during the day, she misses calls after hours, and receptionists are expensive. She was like, “They're going to run me $3,000 to $5,000 a month.” They got to train the person, and they might leave. It just seemed like a headache. The first thing we built was an AI that could answer her hair salon’s phone calls, so the very first industry vertical technically that we did was hair salons.
From there, we worked with various other industries, and after about two years, we decided to focus on hospitality for a couple of reasons. One, we didn't want to be everything for everyone. We realized that there's power in focus, especially for an AI product. We know from experience that these AI products perform better when they're focused on a specific industry and use case. Also, restaurant operators just freaking love the product, so it was pretty clear that we should focus there, and I'm so happy that we did. Just on a personal level, I love restaurants. I love hospitality. When I was younger, I legitimately wanted to be a chef, and my parents used to buy me cookbooks, and I would cook every recipe from cover to cover. I somehow ended up being an engineer, I don't know what happened along the way, but I still have a deep connection with food and hospitality.
There's power in focus, especially for an AI product.
That's funny, by the way. I can imagine you as a young kid cooking. We didn't really talk about this, we glossed over it, and sometimes that's what happens with this term AI. People hear it, they just know that something's happening in the background. Without revealing the secret sauce, what is actually happening in the background? How do you do it? What's going on? Are there robots crawling around answering these questions? How does it happen?
I love digging into this stuff, and I can nerd out on it all day. I'll explain roughly how it works. There are three components to it. One component is an AI part of the system that takes your speech and transforms it into text, or understands what you're saying, and sends that to a computer, basically. Once you understand what the guest is saying, there's an AI model that tries to translate that input into some action. How does that work? It might seem like a black box, but the way it works in general is, the way to think about it is, we've got over 10 million calls that we've processed. We have a database of 10 million restaurant calls. We know all the reasons why guests call, pretty much, we've seen it all. We take those 10 million calls, and then we feed them into a model that learns what all the questions are that guests might ask and what responses we should give when those questions are asked.
Those responses are programmed in our software. When operators onboard with us, we set it up for them, and they have all of their responses programmed. Then you've got everything you need, the AI can understand what guests are saying, and it knows how to respond back. The last piece is the digital voice, so there's actually a voice that talks to the guest. That's an area that we get really excited about too, because the voice is so important for the way that your brand is coming across. We don't want the voices to sound too robotic, we want them to sound human-like. We've got all kinds of accents as well, British accents, Australian accents. We even have a customer with a Nigerian accent that we custom-made. That's part of it as well. That's roughly how it works, but we could go deeper into any of that stuff if it's interesting.
It's funny, I had written down voice right here because that was my next question. I was curious about that. People want to feel an interaction, not like press one to do this. How did you solve that smoothness problem?
We spend a lot of time and energy designing the flow, even at the word level, like what are the actual words that the AI is saying at every step? We have a full-time team member, her name is Becca. She's like a world expert in conversational design, which is exactly the flow. She was at Amazon, she worked with the Alexa team, and she's working with us. She's also a professor in this stuff. There are very few people in the world who know how to design these types of systems, and we're very lucky to have one of them working with us. We take that part very seriously because we really care about the guest experience.
Before starting this company, my co-founder and I were at Spotify, building voice AI experiences and building other types of experiences. We come from the consumer tech world, so we always think about what the experience is like for the actual human using this AI product, which is the guest in this scenario. What is the actual guest experience? Would we like that if we were the guests? Are we proud of it? The flow of the conversation, the voice, the personality, all those things are crucial to making it a good guest experience, and we think very deeply about that every day.
I love Spotify, by the way. That must have been a fun time to be there.
So fun.
You guys are in growth mode yourself, growing like crazy, raising money, and so forth. I want to spin that into culture, growing fast and hiring people, finding people. Restaurants have trouble finding people, you probably also do. You have to recruit and engage people. How do you think about culture?
Culture
This is a fun topic. I think for us, the starting point is what are the values that we want to live by? We think of those as the non-negotiable components of our culture. We spent a lot of time redoing our values about a year and a half ago. My co-founder and I put together a set of values when we first started the company, but we didn't even know what the company was going to be at that point. It was just the two of us. We were just in a room with a whiteboard, writing some words on the whiteboard. After a couple of years, maybe 2, 3 years, we started to learn, what really is this business? What values do we want to live by?
We spent a lot of time coming up with values that we feel we can live by and also make decisions by, meaning hiring decisions, even firing decisions. The values are critical, and we can always do better at incorporating the values more and more every day, which we're always thinking about. Outside of the values, it's really about that softer side of it. Is this person just going to gel with their team members? Is it going to be a collaborative, positive environment if we bring this person in? You're trying to assess that softer side too. That's just as important as a leader, when you bring someone in, just thinking about, are they going to get along with the rest of the team members? Also, the way that you bring people in is very important for culture.
That's been a big lesson for me. You can't just throw people into an org and expect them to figure it out. You've got to habituate them, set them up for success, really empower them to do the work, and make sure everybody understands and is on board with what they're doing, especially if they're a very senior hire. There's so much more I could talk about on culture. I could talk about this all day, but those are some of my learnings.
You can't just throw people into an organization and expect them to figure it out. You have to habituate them, set them up for success, and really empower them to do the work.
It's a big topic. The thing you just talked about spans restaurants specifically, that onboarding process, that starting process. Don't just throw people into the fire. You can see it when you're a diner, when you have that server and they have to go back to the kitchen five times in your one conversation. They didn't do training. They didn't bring them on board. They don't know the history of the restaurant. All that stuff is really important. That spans all companies.
When your frontline staff is at a restaurant, it even goes bigger. I like to bring that up since you were talking about it. One of the things I saw on your site is case studies, education, eBooks, and in your space, there is a little bit of education necessary. What is it? What are we doing? I don't know what that is. I'm a restaurateur. I'm sure you hear this all the time. They're not the most tech-savvy necessarily. I don't know what you're talking about. Have you guys had to do that education process?
A little bit. When we first started the company, this was pre-ChatGPT. AI wasn't in the news every day. Back then, we were afraid to call it an AI product. We didn't even talk about AI because we thought it would just turn people off. Now AI is sexy, like, everybody wants to hear about it. It's actually an asset for us, which is great. I think the biggest piece of education is really just around the correct preconceived notion that automated experiences can be bad, can be frustrating, or can damage the guest experience.
That's a really big fear. Because when you hear an automated voice system, what do you think about? You think about calling a bank or an airline and getting stuck in an endless loop with a bot and feeling trapped. We're traumatized by that. That's probably the biggest thing we need to get over. It's like, hey, this is a new wave of AI. AI can actually be a good guest experience. The way that we're designing the technology is with the guest in mind.
We are guest-first. We'll never do something like trap a guest. We'll never do anything that we think could hurt the guest experience. That's been the biggest thing. I think restaurant operators have a reputation for being not as tech-savvy. I think post-COVID, we've been seeing really forward-looking operators leaning into technology. It's actually really amazing. A lot of these operators are really sophisticated.
I think there's been a realization across the board that with margins so low, we've got to find ways to do better. Can this tech solution find me a point on my bottom line? Two, three points? What can I do? It is more open than in the past. I had to make a bunch of calls to banks and stuff for some other family stuff, and I found myself going "Representative" when you get trapped in the line. It's frustrating because you go in a loop. One thing I meant to hit on earlier, but I didn’t. I know your system has a way of passing through certain requests to actual people. Talk about that.
Our system is set up to automatically forward if the guest asks to be forwarded at any point. Even if it’s upfront, it's set up to forward the guest if they have trouble with the system or seem frustrated. Operators can also set up certain questions to automatically forward as well. Sometimes that’s the intended behavior. One example that we like to bring up when we talk about this is food poisoning. If a guest calls a restaurant and says, "Hey, I got food poisoning from the tuna tartare," or whatever, you probably don't want AI handling that. You need that to escalate to a GM, probably. For things like that, the system will automatically forward.
Advice
Before we talk about the company and give pointers on where to go, I want to talk about some bonus questions that go outside of the scope a bit, just your life lessons and advice and so forth. Let's go to advice first. You’re growing a company and in that fun tech space, any really good pieces of advice that stick out to you from recent times?
I would say in terms of advice that I've learned, or I would say things that I've learned along the way, there are many. I think one is really just leaning into the human side of company building. I think restaurant operators definitely understand this, but when you're running a team, motivating people is really what it's all about. You need to make sure that folks understand what motivates your team, and you need to understand what's on their minds. You need to understand how to help people grow in their careers and feel like they're moving forward. All of those things are super important. You can't just paint a vision and say, "Alright, go, go do this thing."
You've got to engage with people on a human level, get them bought in, and really think about the emotional and psychological parts of running a business. I think a lot of people overlook that, for sure. I don't think those people are fun to work for. The other thing that I've learned as we've continued to scale the business is, and I'm sure a lot of operators resonate with this, you've got to learn to let stuff go. You’ve got to empower your team. You’ve got to learn to trust people. If you can't trust people, ask yourself why. Maybe you don't have the right people. You need to go find people that you can trust, but at some point, you're going to get to a scale where you have to start letting things go. If you're having trouble with that, you've got to explore what's holding you back and prioritize your time. Focus on the things that only you can do in your seat.
You have to learn to let stuff go. You have to empower your team. You have to learn to trust people.
For restaurants, too, there are so many details of the business that, if you don’t have the ability to let stuff go, you’ll never get out of that run mentality. Let’s go to a favorite quote or a favorite saying. Is there anything you have on the wall? Anything you point to in meetings? What do you think?
Yeah. For me, what comes to mind here is pretty funny. I got some mixed messages from my parents. My dad used to tell me that you have to be the best in whatever you do, and then my mom used to tell me that there's always someone better than you. I got both sides of it. I think it’s blended in me with this attitude of humble excellence. Try and do good work, try and be the best, but never get too comfortable. Always know that there's someone around the corner that's better than you on some dimension.
I always have this mindset of just never getting too comfortable, always getting better, and being humble, knowing that I'm not the smartest person in the world. I'm not the best at really probably anything. There's always someone better in some corner of the world. You can keep that in mind while also trying to be great.
Right, whether it's sports, speaking or coding, somebody somewhere is always that one better. I love it. Let's go to a book, something you're either reading or something that you would recommend. What do you think?
I'll give you two. My favorite book is The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, the follow-up to The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clay Christensen. Really iconic business book, and strategy book, and it has helped guide a lot of my strategy decisions and thinking. Just an amazing book. Something I’m reading now is The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. I'm always reading all kinds of books in different domains. The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation is one that keeps coming up, and I'm kind of halfway through it. It's really a good one if you're interested in sales or just persuading people. It’s a good one.
Sales, like selling products, goods, and services?
It's sales. Selling products and services. It’s more about what are the archetypes of salespeople, and what are good sales techniques. It has its own sales philosophy. Within that philosophy, what does good look like? What is it? How do you run a sales conversation? All those things.
The Restaurant Industry
I haven't seen that one. I didn’t know that there was a follow-up to the Christensen book. I'll have to read it. I have the original from years ago when I was doing business school. In the restaurant industry, you guys are at the forefront. You're in the tech space. It's changing. Where would you say you see some pieces of the restaurant industry in, say, 2 or 3 years? What do you think?
I think we're going to continue to see technology leveraged more and more. I think we're going to see more streamlined operations. I think we're going to see more automation. We're thinking about this too, I'd love to see how AI can make the guest experience more personalized. How can we improve the guest experience? How can we free up staff time to deliver experiences? Maybe even a level of service that we haven't seen before. Is it possible to increase your level of service while also becoming more efficient?
I think so. I think we're going to see that. These are just the trends that I'm seeing on the ground. Last night, we had a dinner with operators in San Francisco, and there was one operator who was telling me how they decided to just get rid of all their servers. Their restaurant, just a full-service restaurant, has no servers anymore. They followed the Bar Taco model, where they just have a host, QR codes on the tables for ordering, and runners. They decided to, instead of investing in servers, invest in events. They use some of that budget to do weekly trivia or whatever it is, and that's really working for them.
I was shocked to hear that they just got rid of their servers. She said that they were able to reduce their labor costs by 30% and drive more traffic by reinvesting elsewhere. That's a pretty dramatic shift. I think we're going to see more of that in different areas. Obviously, that move is not going to work for many restaurants, but that's a move they made. I was shocked and fascinated that they made that move. I think there are a lot of operators that are really just changing the way they run their businesses. Technology is a big part of that.
A lot of operators are really just changing the way they run their businesses and technology is a big part of that.
That's a big one. Thanks for sharing that. What would you say? Think about this one for a second. What's one thing that not too many folks know about you? What do you think?
What a lot of people don't know about me is I'm half-Italian. I'm actually an Italian citizen. I love to cook Italian food. Carbonara is my dish of choice. I cook a mean carbonara.
Resources
We'll have to hold you to the task, should we meet in person! Let's go to resources you want to share, the website, parting thoughts, and things we didn't touch on. Please take it in any direction for the next little bit.
Obviously, I’ve got to plug Slang. You can find us at Slang.ai. We've got tons of resources and case studies. We love to do research and position ourselves as thought leaders in the space of AI in general for restaurants. It's not just about our product but about what's happening industry-wide in terms of AI, how operators are perceiving AI, and how they're investing in it. We've got several surveys on our website that we put a lot of effort into, which we think are valuable. Check those out.
Any other parting advice or closing thoughts?
I would say I love connecting with operators. If I can be helpful in any way, whether it’s just chatting, nerding out on AI, or discussing how AI can help restaurants, whether it’s voice AI or anything else, we see a lot of tech stacks as well. If you're thinking about not even AI but POS, reservation management, review management, or anything else, we see so much. We work with over a thousand operators. We've seen it all, and we love just sharing what we see in case it’s helpful. If that’s of interest, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Awesome. It’s so challenging for operators, probably thinking about question, like, "How do we integrate that with this new other thing?" People have obviously done it. Without reinventing the wheel, people like yourself are seeing a lot more than Joe on the street, who's dealing with one location. Appreciate that. Good stuff there, Alex Sambvani of Slang AI. You can find them on the web at Slang.ai. For more great restaurant marketing and service tips, tech insights, and more, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, do me a favor, wherever you're listening or watching, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, review us, and rate us, all that stuff helps us, and it’s appreciated. With that, I will say see you next time. Thanks, Alex.
Thanks.