Australian restaurants and bars are slowly allowing AI to handle their paperwork, marking a clear shift in how the hospitality industry operates behind the scenes.
The technology being adopted isn’t the kind you chat with. Rather than conversational AI like ChatGPT or Claude, venues are turning to agentic AI tools like Dext‘s AI Assist, which uses computer vision to read receipts and invoices, including handwritten ones, and automatically extract and categorise every line item into the correct place in a venue’s bookkeeping records.
Venues leveraging AI
Steven Blaine from Decimal, a hospitality finance and technology partner based in Western Australia, said the problem the technology is solving is bigger than it looks from the outside.
“Running a hospitality business is a real grind at times. However, technology is changing this, and many venues are capitalising on new ways of working by leveraging AI,” he said.
“If you run a large kitchen, you’re getting fruit and vegetables every day, seafood, meat and all sorts of deliveries. You might have 50 supplier invoices on a weekly basis just for one department. On top of this, hospitality businesses also require far more granular financial data than many other industries because operators need precise visibility into spending across multiple categories. Applying an AI agent to this challenge means more precision, fewer mistakes and saving a lot of time.”
Real world applications
The real-world applications are surprisingly specific. One of Decimal’s clients was buying produce for both its bar and kitchen from the same supplier, but with invoices addressed slightly differently depending on the account. Before AI, separating those costs manually was unavoidable. Now it happens automatically.
Blaine said, “AI-powered automation can separate these costs easily and precisely, saving the venue huge amounts of time, and allowing them to calculate profit from food sales more easily.”
“One of our hospo clients buys fruit and vegetables for both their bar and kitchen from the same supplier. But the invoices are addressed slightly differently depending on the account,” he added.
“Before AI, we couldn’t automatically code those invoices correctly, separating the two different budgets for the venue’s bar and kitchen. AI now can seamlessly code everything to the right expense account, without any manual input from us or the venue.”
Another Decimal client needed fuel levy charges separated from food costs during a period of rising diesel prices.
“We used the auto-categorisation, line-item extraction and agentic AI rule on Dext to automate the process. The combination of automation, AI-powered data extraction and intelligent categorisation dramatically improves both efficiency and accuracy for hospitality operators,” Blaine explained.
Regulation, compliance and front-of-house use
AI is also being used for regulatory compliance in the hospitality space. During an ATO audit, cancelled ABNs from suppliers can become a serious liability for venues.
According to Blaine, if the ATO audits a venue and finds cancelled ABNs from suppliers, that becomes a serious issue. It’s up to the venue to check that all their suppliers have a valid ABN, and that can be a real pain. AI comes to the rescue in those instances.
The technology is also moving into front-of-house. AI-powered reservation agents can answer incoming calls, collect customer details and book tables without any staff involvement, a meaningful development for venues dealing with ongoing staffing shortages.
“One really interesting area is AI-powered reservation agents,” Blain shared. “When you ring a venue, instead of a staff member stopping what they’re doing to answer the phone, the AI handles the booking, collects the customer information and reserves the table automatically.”
Cloud-based point-of-sale platforms are also embedding AI-driven analytics that let operators ask plain-language questions about their business and get answers instantly rather than manually pulling reports.
“You can ask questions like: ‘How many people come back after using the burger-and-pint promotion to buy anything else?’ Previously, you’d have to manually run reports and analyse the data yourself. Now AI can surface those insights almost instantly.”
For an industry that runs on razor-thin margins, the question is no longer whether AI has a place in hospitality. It’s how quickly venues can get on board.
Source: Brightus
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