Voice AI phone answering platform Loman is further dialing in on its goal to integrate with the top point-of-sale systems across the restaurant industry, announcing a partnership with SpotOn in late January.
Christian Wiens, CEO and founder of Loman, said integrating with popular restaurant POS systems is not simply an effort to capture more customers. Rather, he described the POS as the “beating heart of the restaurant ecosystem,” adding that each partnership makes the voice AI platform more accessible and valuable to operators.
“At the end of the day, if you’re not integrating directly with the mission-critical systems that the restaurant is using — pulling their menu data; being able to take orders; pulling their availability for reservations; being able to automatically understand when something is out of stock; really understanding the menu in real time at at a deep level, the way the POS presents it; and then using that to inform how the voice agent — you just don’t have a tool that actually works,” Wiens said.
Christian Wiens, CEO and Founder of Loman
Loman integrates with approximately two dozen of the top players in the restaurant POS space. The company is gaining momentum in its second year of business, currently welcoming nearly 1,000 new customers, according to Wiens.
“Our goal is to give restaurants tech that actually makes the shift easier,” Bryan Solar, SpotOn’s chief product officer, said in a press release. “Every call is revenue on the line. With Loman, operators keep the phone from becoming a bottleneck, protect peak-hour sales, and free up the team to move faster on the floor.”
Wiens anticipated that the recent widespread adoption of voice AI would continue to gain momentum across the restaurant scene. He said the sector is quickly overcoming outdated reputations for phone bots.
“We’ve been strapped with the baggage of old ‘phone bots,’” Wiens said, referencing the voice-over-internet-protocol systems that earn robo-phone answers a negative stereotype. “The old guard of phone bots were horrible, these VoIP systems: ‘Press one for this; press two for that; press three for this.’ … In general, this idea that putting a bot on the phone is a bad idea comes from years of ingrained bias around how bad it is.”
Loman uses leading large language models to communicate with customers and built a proprietary solution to make the agent sound as human as possible while maintaining over 99 percent accuracy in its responses. Wiens reported 40 percent of callers do not realize they are speaking with an AI agent.
Loman can onboard and start servicing restaurant operators in a matter of days, according to Wiens. He anticipated that up to 95% of restaurants would use voice AI for phone calls in the coming years, potentially resulting in an impact similar to that of digital ordering on off-prem revenue streams.
Wiens said Loman customers are split approximately evenly between operators who want to keep their employees focused on other tasks and those who need to hire additional staff to answer phones but lack sufficient budget space.
“At the end of the day, this allows restaurants to provide better hospitality and make more money,” Wiens said. “If you have a tool that can do that, and it’s cheaper than hiring a human, it’s going to be the standard.”
