Originally published on Hospitality Technology.
The Vision AI category in QSR has evolved a lot in the past year.
Brands like Zaxby’s and Culver’s have decided to roll out AI camera timers brand-wide, validating the technology and accelerating interest across the industry. With that momentum has come a wave of new entrants, from adjacent categories and existing players expanding their pitches. More entrants is good for the category. It also means more noise, and operators are getting more demo requests than they can reasonably evaluate.
The question that comes up most often from QSR peers right now is: ‘Given so many vendors, how do you actually tell them apart?’ Below are three questions to ask every Vision AI vendor before signing.
Question 1: Ask About Accuracy and Listen to How They Answer
Every vendor will tell you their accuracy is high. The more useful signal is how they answer follow-up questions. A few things to listen for:
How specifically and granularly do they describe their accuracy? Does it vary across different parts of the drive-thru (pre-menu, menu, window), types of drive-thru layouts, or weather conditions? It should. A vendor who tells you accuracy is uniform across every condition either has not measured carefully or is not being candid.
How do they monitor accuracy after deployment? AI systems are not like traditional software. Model performance drifts as store conditions change (new menu items, camera angle shifts, seasonal lighting, packaging updates). A vendor who treats accuracy as a one-time benchmark rather than an ongoing operational discipline will eventually disappoint you.
What are the common edge cases or failure modes their AI runs into? If the answer is “we don’t really have issues,” that is the answer of someone who has not deployed at scale. Every Vision AI system has failure modes. The mature vendors know theirs intimately and can talk about them openly.
The key is to listen to how sophisticated their process is, not how glamorous they promise their accuracy. The gap between a vendor who can speak fluently about their accuracy methodology and one who can’t is usually the same gap you’ll see in their production performance.
Question 2: Ask What They Shipped in the Last Two Quarters, Not What They’ll Ship Next Year
Vision AI is exciting because the same camera infrastructure can support new use cases as the underlying AI improves. This is also where vendors overpromise the most. Roadmaps in this category tend to be aspirational, with every interesting feature conveniently arriving “next quarter.”
It is genuinely hard for an operator to evaluate a roadmap. You don’t know what is realistic and what is not. The shortcut is to flip the question: instead of asking what they will ship, ask what they have shipped in the last two quarters. Ask for specifics. Which features went live, in how many stores, and what did customers do with them?
This tells you two things a roadmap can’t: first, the actual pace and direction of the company’s product development; and second, whether the vendor has a track record of converting promises into deployed features.
A vendor with a thin list of recently shipped features and a long list of future ones is telling you where they are, even if it is not the impression they intend to leave.
Question 3: Ask for Customer References and Weight Them Heavily
This is the most reliable check you can do, and it’s underused. References are the only way to verify that a vendor’s claims survive contact with real operations. They deserve more weight than demos, decks, or pilots. A few notes on how to use references well:
Ask for both vendor-provided references and try to find backdoor ones through your own network. The gap between the two is often informative.
Ask reference customers about specifics: how the rollout actually went, how the vendor handled edge cases, what happened when something broke, how responsive support is, and whether the system’s performance has held up or degraded over time.
Be skeptical of vendors who decline reference requests citing “customer privacy.” Every established vendor has customers willing to speak on their behalf. A vendor unable or unwilling to produce them is telling you something about either their customer base or their relationships with it.
References are the closest thing to ground truth you’ll get in this category. They should carry more weight than any other input.
The operators who do best in this environment are not the ones who pick the flashiest vendor or the one with the most polished pitch. They’re the ones who ask harder questions earlier, and who give more weight to evidence than to promises.
