UK diners want AI perks, not AI prices, Toast finds

Nearly a quarter of UK diners want more AI-powered personalised offers from restaurants, according to research from restaurant technology platform Toast published on 6 October.

Toast surveyed diners and operators and found 23% of UK diners want more AI-driven personalised offers and rewards, while 22% want faster ordering and shorter waits. Among operators, 30% already use AI for personalisation and a further 34% are trialling it.

The payoff shows up mostly on the operator side: 58% of restaurant managers using AI report more customer visits and higher spending. Fewer diners report feeling the benefit directly.

Diners care most about getting a good deal and having a great time.

Pricing is where the research finds the most friction. Sixty-nine percent of diners said they had noticed dynamic pricing in restaurants, and only 31% felt they had got a good deal when they did. Operators see it differently: 81% say AI-informed pricing has let them lower or hold prices rather than raise them.

Gaurav Nakhare of Toast argued the two findings are compatible rather than contradictory. "Diners care most about getting a good deal and having a great time," he said.

The research also found limits to what diners want automated. Forty-seven percent want easy access to a human if something goes wrong, a quarter say complaints should not be handled by AI at all, and 17% specifically flagged allergen questions as inappropriate for an algorithm to answer.

Personalisation meets a pricing trust gap

The split between operator confidence and diner suspicion lines up with a wider pattern in UK hospitality this year, as AI booking agents have begun colliding with restaurants' own reservation systems, prompting some platforms to block them outright. Diners appear readier to accept AI in service and recommendations than in the price on the bill.

That gap matters for how operators roll AI out. A personalised offer reads as a perk; a price that moves without explanation reads as a penalty, even when operators say the tool is holding prices down rather than pushing them up.

Where restaurants are drawing the line

Allergen questions and complaints are the two areas diners most want kept human, the research found, both tied to situations with a wrong answer that carries real consequences. That lines up with how other food-service technology has rolled out this year, including Deliveroo's delivery robots in London, which still route exceptions to a human controller rather than resolving them automatically.

Toast's findings suggest the next phase of restaurant AI will be judged less on what it can do and more on which tasks diners are willing to hand over.