Technology
Photo: Paloma
June 6, 2025
Palona AI has created Restaurant AI, an artificial intelligence sales assistant designed specifically for the pizza, fast casual and quick-service restaurant industries. The AI can mimic specific people’s voices and is trained to master the complexity of highly customized and frequently modified orders, integrating real-time cart memory and conversational modifiers while maintaining an on-brand tone. It integrates seamlessly with all major point-of-sale systems, allowing for quick setup, Maria Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Palona.
“With Restaurant AI, we’re bringing Palona’s powerful and delightful Agent experience to the most complex menu categories in food service,” she said in a company press release.
As any business grows, it’s so hard to scale that kind of relationship building, which is what makes Palona so powerful, said Shawn Walchef, founder of CaliBBQ.
“Now, when a customer calls CaliBBQ, they’re not talking to some call center in another country; they’re talking to ShawnAI,” he said in the release. “I used Palona not only to match our customer service and our brand values, but to literally replicate my own voice. Whether it’s one or one thousand customers, they have a conversation with me, using my own voice, giving them the best hospitality experience possible.”
Following a pilot with West Coast pizza chain Pizza My Heart, Palona AI is now working with over 20 restaurants and brands nationwide, including Twenty Five Teishoku House, Kobunga, MOTO Pizza, CaliBBQ and Pleasure Pizza Santa Cruz.
“Our pilot with Pizza My Heart showed us just how impactful an intelligent agent could be when it understands every nuance of a menu, remembers past orders, and engages customers like a real team member. Now, with more nationwide restaurant brands on board, we’re scaling that service to a much broader audience,” Zhang said.
To lead the initiative, Palona Martin Briant, former president of North America for Me&U, and Chris Stanton, former strategic sales executive for Qualtrics and Tableau Software.
Palona’s Restaurant AI combines advanced conversational intelligence, complex customization handling and a multimodal memory system to ensure accurate food orders via voice or text, delivered with “the same charm and care as a seasoned staffer.”
Key features of the Restaurant AI include:
- Unified voice and text: Provides consistent, high-quality customer experiences for orders and reservations across voice and text interactions.
- Multi-lingual support: Seamlessly supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish and Chinese.
- Voice customization: Allows restaurant owners to clone their own voice or create a new brand voice with specific personality traits, regional dialects and accents.
- Accuracy and security: Offers proven accuracy for complex orders and secure, compliant payment processing integrated with existing systems.
- Revenue and service enhancements: Incorporates intuitive upselling, a managerial AI for customer issue escalation, and dynamic integration with loyalty programs and coupons.
Lee Kindell, founder of MOTO Pizza, added, “When I first heard my voice as our ordering AI, I honestly couldn’t believe it. We live and breathe technology every day in our business but, at our heart, we’re restauranteurs and care about the customer experience above all else. Palona’s ability to provide such incredible service to every single customer, across multiple languages and all in my voice, is so above and beyond any AI solution I’ve seen in-market. It blew me away.”
Palona AI notes its industry-leading accuracy is achieved through continuous testing and improvement via innovative benchmarking and order simulation technology.
