CardFree Launches ‘Smart AI Upsell’ Feature for Restaurants, Hospitality Businesses

CardFree has added a new Smart AI Upsell feature to its online ordering platform for the restaurant and hospitality industry.

This feature uses artificial intelligence (AI) and historical ordering data to suggest items that are paired with those that are already in the customer’s basket, prior to checkout, the company said in a Wednesday (June 12) press release.

“The tool leverages the history of flavor trends and ordering preferences that are married together and mines that data to come up with a much more intelligent upsell,” Jon Squire, founder and CEO of CardFree, said in the release.

CardFree is making Smart AI Upsell available to anyone, regardless of the vendor they use for online ordering, via application programming interface (API), according to the release.

This is the first of several AI-enhanced updates CardFree plans to add to its Payments, Loyalty and Ordering platforms in the coming months. The company sees opportunities to use the technology to drive operational efficiencies, frequency and larger tickets, per the release.

“As AI progresses, we’ll start to see things like cook times, order frequency, back-end inventory and other critical operational aspects leverage AI, so we’re expanding into those areas with our own products,” Squire said in the release.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that restaurants are making use of technology in a variety of ways, including curbside pickup, mobile order ahead and automation in their operations.

Consumers are eagerly embracing these digital engagement capabilities, with more than 146 million Americans now ordering digitally via restaurant apps, websites and aggregator tools, according to “Inflation Puts Technology on the Menu for Restaurants,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and American Express collaboration.

In another recent development in this space, Nory said in May that it raised $16 million in Series A funding to expand the use of AI in the hospitality industry. Nory offers an “AI restaurant manager” that offers data-backed insights that help hospitality businesses optimize staffing levels, predict demand, select the right inventory and make other strategic decisions.

In April, Toast made an AI-based Benchmarking tool available to select users, saying the tool will enable leaders to compare the performance of their restaurants and menu categories against aggregated data from other restaurants that use the Toast platform.