AI in restaurants 2026: what operators are actually buying

In the first eight months of 2026, published surveys put restaurant AI adoption anywhere from 26% to 95% — a 69-point spread on what sounds like the same question. Both numbers are accurate. This page traces where each one comes from, why they disagree, and what the more specific findings — which mostly agree with each other — say about what restaurants are actually spending on.

How many restaurants are using AI in 2026?

Answer: it depends entirely on what counts as "using AI." Five figures published in 2026 alone:

• 26% — the National Restaurant Association's 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry report: the share of operators who say they use AI-related tools, period.
• 69% — Popmenu's January 2026 survey of 328 U.S. restaurant operators: 44% already using AI in some form, another 25% planning to start within the year.
• 69% (a different 69%) — Restaurant365's mid-2026 survey found AI use for back-office reporting and analytics specifically jumped from about 25% to 69% in six months. Same number as Popmenu's, measuring a narrower category, for unrelated reasons — a coincidence worth flagging so the two never get cited as agreement.
• 86% — Toast's 2025 survey of 712 U.S. restaurant decision-makers who say they're comfortable using AI. That's a comfort question, not a usage question.
• 95% — TouchBistro's 2025 State of Restaurants report, surveying 600 U.S. independent full-service operators specifically, found nearly all report using "some form" of AI in their restaurant.

Treat any single restaurant AI-adoption percentage you see quoted as meaningless until you know its definition.

Why do the numbers disagree by 70 points?

Answer: they aren't measuring the same behavior. The low end (NRA's 26%) counts operators who name a dedicated AI-labeled tool. The high end (TouchBistro's 95%, Popmenu's 69%) counts anyone using AI-powered features already bundled into software they already own — a POS that auto-drafts a marketing email, a scheduling tool with a forecasting model behind it, ChatGPT used once to write a social caption. Ask an operator "do you use AI" and most think of a chatbot they'd have to set up. Show them a feature list and they'll recognize AI they didn't know they had.

Both readings are real. The gap between them is itself the finding: most restaurants have AI running somewhere in their stack without having made an AI purchasing decision, while a much smaller share have deliberately adopted a tool they'd describe as "AI."

Is restaurant AI investment actually increasing?

Yes, industry-wide — with a caveat about who was asked. Deloitte's State of AI in Restaurants survey (375 restaurant executives across 11 countries, Q4 2024) found 82% plan to increase AI investment in the next fiscal year, only 2% expect a decrease, and enhanced customer experience is the single most-cited expected benefit (6 in 10 respondents).

The caveat: Deloitte's sample skews heavily toward large, multi-unit operators — 93% employ 1,000 or more workers, and more than a third came from organizations with 2,000-plus locations. That 82% is a real number, but it's a number about restaurant chains, not independent restaurants specifically. No 2026 survey we found asked independent operators the identical investment-intention question at that scale.

What are restaurants actually spending AI on?

Marketing content, overwhelmingly, followed by back-office reporting. Popmenu found 55% of operators already use AI to write marketing content. The NRA's broader survey found the same pattern from the other direction: marketing is the single largest AI use case, cited by 19% of full-service and 15% of limited-service operators — well ahead of administrative work (10%) or anything guest-facing. Restaurant365's mid-year data shows the same back-office concentration: AI use for reporting and analytics alone nearly tripled in six months (25% to 69%), the fastest-moving category in their survey.

Where guest-facing AI actually sits — and why the size of the restaurant is the real variable

This is the finding worth remembering: guest-facing AI isn't lagging everywhere equally — it's concentrated almost entirely at the chain end of the industry and close to absent at the independent end.

Deloitte's enterprise-skewed sample reports high guest-facing AI use: 60% say they use chatbots daily, and 63% report daily AI use in customer experience generally. That tracks — drive-thru voice bots and kiosk ordering systems are the kind of guest-facing AI that pencils out at chain scale, where one system serves thousands of locations.

The NRA's broader, all-segment survey — which by definition oversamples independents, since independents are most of the industry — tells a different story at the guest-facing layer specifically: only 6% of restaurants use AI for customer orders at all. Restaurant365's own investment-priority data confirms the tilt from the spending side: among operators actively planning AI investment for the second half of 2026, front-of-house AI ranked last, at 6.31% of planned spend, behind back-of-house AI at 9.09% and every other category surveyed.

Put the three together: the restaurants driving Deloitte's 60%-daily-chatbot figure are mostly large chains running drive-thru and kiosk bots. The restaurants that make up the NRA's broader sample — independents and small groups, the majority of the industry — are barely touching guest-facing AI at all, even as they adopt AI for marketing and back-office work at real rates. TouchBistro's 95%-of-independents figure doesn't contradict this; we could not find a category-level breakdown behind that number, and "some form of AI" almost certainly includes the same marketing and admin tools NRA and Restaurant365 also find dominant — not a guest-facing host.

Are restaurants ready for what they're buying?

Mostly not, by their own account — another Deloitte finding worth carrying over from the enterprise data, since under-readiness usually gets worse, not better, at smaller scale. Fewer than 30% of Deloitte's respondents say their organization is prepared on technology infrastructure or talent; only around 20% feel ready on risk and governance. The two most-cited obstacles to deploying AI are identifying the right use case and managing risk — both cited by 48% of respondents — ahead of budget, technology choice, or leadership buy-in, none of which operators say is holding them back.

So what does "AI in restaurants" actually mean in 2026?

Mostly: a marketing tool, or a reporting dashboard, adopted by a restaurant that may not think of it as "AI" at all — and, at the small number of large chains where it does mean something guest-facing, a drive-thru bot or a kiosk. What it does not yet mean, at the independent and small-group end of the industry that makes up most restaurants, is a guest-facing conversational tool — the NRA's 6% is the most specific, most conservative number in this entire spread, and it is the one about exactly that category.

That gap is where our own product sits, for what it's worth. Brief First's free tier — the table card, the private line, the menu — runs with no AI at all; the paid tier is an AI host that answers menu questions in any language and gathers event enquiries, named plainly as what it is, in line with where independent restaurants are on this data: still deciding, not yet sold, and — per NRA's number — mostly not yet asked a guest-facing question at all.