OrderFlowAI

The problem

Restaurants lose revenue every shift to a phone that goes to voicemail.

During peak dinner service, a single line can handle eight calls per hour. The rest go to voicemail, or to a distracted staff member who can't write and expedite simultaneously. A missed call is a missed order — and a regular who won't call back.

The existing solutions were either too rigid (IVR systems built for enterprise) or too manual (forwarding to a call center that slows down the intake). Neither understood natural-language orders with modifiers, upsells, or a regular's preferences.

The approach

Model routing built around the real complexity of restaurant orders.

Voice and SMS intake share the same intake graph. Incoming calls are transcribed and parsed for order intent. A routing layer decides which model handles the conversation:

Kitchen tickets are printed on confirmation via POS webhook integration. An idempotent retry queue ensures a duplicate inbound call never becomes a duplicate ticket — a production edge case that shows up reliably on high-volume weekend nights.

Human-in-the-loop fallback routes any modification outside the menu graph to a staff device in under 10 seconds, preserving the dinner rush rhythm without dropping the customer.

What we learned

The hard part wasn't the AI — it was the kitchen ticket.

Every POS system has a different webhook contract. Some don't support partial order updates; some are idempotent by ticket ID but not by line item. We built an abstraction layer that normalizes across POS vendors before anything reaches the kitchen.

Menu graph accuracy matters more than model quality. If the AI doesn't know that "medium-well with no onions" is a valid modifier for the burger but not the chicken, the fallback rate spikes. Keeping the menu graph fresh and validated — especially during seasonal rotations — is an ongoing operational problem, not a launch problem.

Result

12,000+ orders. Zero missed calls.

Across dinner rushes over the first three months, OrderFlowAI captured every inbound order attempt — no voicemail, no dropped calls during peak. Median end-to-end response from inbound call to kitchen ticket stayed under 4 seconds.

The product is live at orderflowai.pro. We're expanding to catering intake and delivery coordination in Q3 2026.

Stack

Technologies used