This interview was originally published by Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine.
Most of the AI conversation in restaurants is happening where guests can see it — voice ordering, chatbots, phones answered by a machine. Craftable CEO David Cantu sat down with Modern Restaurant Management to argue that the money is somewhere far less photogenic.
"Everyone's talking about the visible stuff," Cantu told MRM. "That's cool, but it's not where the money shows up. The bigger shift right now is happening in the back office — think forecasting, ordering, labor, and invoicing. It's the unglamorous 'plumbing' that decides whether a restaurant makes money."
Cantu spent nearly two decades in restaurants before building software for them — starting in operations at P.F. Chang's, co-founding HotSchedules, leading BlackBox Intelligence, and today co-owning a restaurant. That history shapes how he reads the current wave of AI pilots, including the MIT NANDA finding that 95 percent of them produced no measurable return.
"Mostly it came down to generic tools that were never built for a specific workflow, data that was messy or disconnected from the start, and teams launching a pilot without ever defining what success would look like."
The interview covers the misconceptions operators bring to AI, the overlooked numbers that actually move profitability, and why static pars quietly cost restaurants margin on both ends — waste on one side, stockouts on the other. Cantu also reframes the retention debate:
"The story that matters in 2026 isn't AI replacing staff, it's AI cutting the burnout and chaos that drives turnover in the first place, and a lot of that burnout comes from managers being the human glue holding disconnected systems together."
He closes with a test operators can apply to any vendor pitch. If a platform can't show you why it reached a conclusion, if it's a generic model wearing a restaurant skin, or if it solves one piece and ignores the rest of your operation, it isn't the right tool yet.
"It has to add value to your operations, make your GM and staff more productive, and help your margins. If it's not doing those three things, tread carefully."
Read the full interview on Modern Restaurant Management →