AI can now answer your phone, take the order, and drop it in the till. This is bigger than restaurants

Here is a concrete glimpse of what “AI in your business” actually looks like in 2026, and it is not a chatbot on a website. As SmartCompany reports, a voice-AI company called Sadie has integrated with Square so a restaurant’s phone gets answered by an AI that takes the order, takes the payment, and drops it straight into the point-of-sale, with no staff touching it. It runs around the clock, it is already live across more than 1,500 Australian venues, and it starts at $149 a month.

Sadie’s APAC country manager Steve Hutchinson framed the point exactly right: “Every missed call is a missed opportunity. For hospitality venues already stretched on staffing, that’s revenue walking out the door.”

He is right. And the important part is that it is not really about restaurants.

The missed-call leak is everywhere

Every business that runs on the phone loses money in the same silent gap. A customer rings. You are on a job, or with a client, or mid-service, or it is after hours. It rings out. They call the next business on the list, and you never even know it happened.

We wrote about the web version of this in speed to lead: the enquiry that goes cold because nobody answered in time. The phone version is the same leak, and for a lot of trades, clinics and salons it is the bigger one. The tradie who cannot answer at 4pm on a roof. The clinic whose reception is at lunch. The salon mid-appointment. Every one of them is Sadie’s restaurant.

What actually changed

Voice AI has quietly crossed a line. It is now good enough to handle a real inbound call, understand what the person wants, answer the common questions, take the booking or the order, and log it in your system, without sounding like a 2015 phone menu shouting “press one”.

That is the plumbing: the repetitive, high-volume, predictable calls, done by a machine so your people can do the actual service. It is the clearest example yet of the line we drew after the ATO’s warning about AI: let AI do the mechanical work, keep humans for the judgement.

The honest boundary

This is genuinely good for the routine calls: the order, the booking, the opening hours, “do you do X, and how much”. It is not for the delicate ones: the upset customer, the complicated custom job, the call that needs a human who can actually decide something. A good setup knows the difference and hands those to a person cleanly, rather than trapping someone in a loop with a robot.

The goal is not to put an AI between you and every customer. It is to stop losing the simple calls you already miss, and to free your people for the calls that genuinely need them. Caught, not walled off.

What to actually do about it

1. Work out what a missed call costs you. Roughly: how many ring out in a week, times the value of an average job or order. That number tends to shock people, and it is your whole business case.
2. Start with the simplest call type. The order, the booking, the “are you open”. The plumbing, not the sensitive complaint.
3. Make sure it lands in your system. The win is not “an AI answered”. It is the order or booking appearing automatically in your POS, calendar or CRM, the way Sadie drops orders into Square, so it is captured, not just handled.
4. Keep a clean human handoff. Anything the AI cannot deal with should reach a real person, not a dead end.

The func.digital take

The phone is still where an enormous amount of service-business revenue is quietly won and lost, and for the first time you can stop losing the calls you miss without hiring a receptionist to sit by it. Whether the answer is Sadie, or a setup built around how your business actually runs, the move is the same: find the calls you are dropping, let AI catch the simple ones, and keep your people for the ones that matter.

If you would like to know what your missed calls are costing you, and where an AI answer would genuinely help versus where it would annoy your customers, that is exactly what a free digital systems audit is for. Get in touch.