In the past month alone, nearly half a dozen startups have emerged from stealth or raised a new round of financing for ”AI-powered” restaurant agents and tools:  Magic, Zavo, Kintow, AIO, and Nory. Some of these products had already existed under other names or were lacking an AI tagline while others are indeed AI-native. Meanwhile, Square recently announced a set of new features that incorporate off-the-shelf AI as well as some functionality from its newly acquired Zitti to bring the best of AI to its pre-existing technology stack. Therein lies the risk of the AI hype cycle– it is simply not enough to slap an “agentic” label on your product, it has to be indispensable given the existing set of entrenched options– AI or not. Thus, in my opinion, AI restaurant tech remains an untouchable subsector of the broader uninvestible restaurant technology umbrella, especially when it comes to cutting costs over growing revenue. Instead, industry incumbents will use plain vanilla AI from the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI, just like everyone uses cloud computing from Microsoft or Amazon. We just need to shut up about it already.