AI in your restaurant, without the hype

These days every tool says it has artificial intelligence. If you run a kitchen, the useful question isn't which model is behind it. It's this: what work does it take off my plate, and how much control does it leave me?

Here's our answer, including what we do and what we'd rather not do.

Three jobs where AI genuinely helps in a restaurant

1. Reading paper. Invoices and delivery notes arrive crumpled, in small print, in a dozen formats. Reading and typing them in is repetitive work, exactly what a machine is good at. In Teremu you photograph the invoice and AI extracts the vendor, the date, and every line item.

2. Watching what you don't have time to watch. A price that creeps up a little each week, a dish that slips below its target margin, a delivery note that doesn't match its invoice. Nobody checks those daily, which is why money leaks out quietly.

3. Answering questions about your own data. Plenty of answers already exist in your business, scattered across screens and spreadsheets. Asking in plain language is faster than hunting for them.

What AI shouldn't do

Make up numbers or decide for you. In Teremu, AI proposes and you decide. You see the invoice photo next to the extracted lines, with warnings where the math doesn't add up. The sum and total checks are deterministic, not a model's guess. Every automatic number is correctable, and your correction always wins.

See what it shouldn't. The context the Assistant uses is filtered by each team member's permissions. A scan-only employee can't ask about the money. And to cost a dish we only need the ingredients and their quantities, never your technique or your kitchen secrets.

The Kitchen Assistant

Inside Teremu there's a ✨ button that opens a context-aware assistant. It knows the information that's already in the app, like your vendors, the dishes on your menu, and your prices, and you can ask it things like:

• "What went up in price this week?"
• "What's the risotto's margin?"
• "How much have I spent with this vendor?"

One thing worth saying plainly: it's a young feature. We're watching how chefs and owners use it day to day, and we'll keep refining it with what we learn. Its answers are only as good as the data in the app, so treat it as a quick colleague, not an authority. It's included in the Pro and Max plans.

How to evaluate any AI tool for your kitchen

Before you buy anything, ask four questions:

1. Does it take work off me or hand me more? If you spend more time correcting than before, it isn't helping.
2. Can I see where each number comes from and fix it? If it's a black box, you can't rely on it.
3. Who sees my data and my recipes? Ask what's shared, what's sold, and what you can delete.
4. Can I try it free? A good product should be tested on your real invoices before you pay.

The bigger idea

AI isn't the product. The product is more time to cook and more clarity about your numbers. If AI helps with that, great. If it doesn't, it's just noise.

Want to see it with your own invoices? Start free, no card needed. If you'd rather understand the why first, read why Teremu exists, see how the Assistant works, or do the math with your kitchen's numbers.