AI Founder Targets Restaurant Owner's Hidden Revenue
Maria Zhang, a former Meta and Tinder AI executive, has launched Palona AI to help restaurants capture missed revenue from phone calls and catering
A former Instagram AI executive is applying her big-tech experience to a common small business problem: missed phone calls. Maria Zhang, CEO of Palona AI, says restaurants lose significant revenue by not answering the phone during busy periods.
Zhang previously served as vice president of engineering at Instagram, where she helped develop the AI strategy to compete with TikTok's Reels. Before that, she was CTO of Tinder, where her team's AI work won an innovation award in 2017. She now believes the restaurant industry presents a more impactful opportunity for AI transformation than big tech.
"We can help Google engineers be more productive, but I think they don't need a lot of help," Zhang told Entrepreneur. She argues restaurant owners and their staff are among the hardest working people, yet are constantly distracted from serving in-person guests by ringing phones and complex catering inquiries.
The Hidden Call Volume
A test on Father's Day at a restaurant called Cali BBQ revealed the scale of the issue. Palona AI handled incoming calls instead of staff, managing roughly 350 calls in a single day. Zhang says the owner was surprised by the volume, as busy lines often mean calls go unanswered.
The AI system fielded questions about table availability, operating hours, and menu items like ribs and brisket. According to Zhang, this intervention led to a doubling of takeout orders and contributed to an 18% year-over-year increase in top-line revenue for the restaurant that day.
Capturing Catering Business
The experiment also identified a major source of untapped revenue: catering. Zhang says many of the calls were for large orders, which involve complex logistics like budgeting, guest counts, and customized proposals. These inquiries can overwhelm a manager.
In response, Palona AI built a dedicated AI catering manager to handle these interactions from initial contact through follow-up. Zhang claims one restaurant chain using the system generated $5,800 in catering sales in a single day through the AI assistant.
The AI Playbook for Small Business
Zhang's approach mirrors the strategy used at Instagram to counter TikTok. "To win against TikTok, the secret sauce is AI," she said, explaining that AI can identify opportunities and recommend actions at the right moment. She sees this wave of AI transformation as potentially more impactful than the advent of the internet or the iPhone.
For restaurant owners, the goal is to offload repetitive tasks. Zhang views AI as a tool to handle background work without distracting employees from the guests in front of them. Her move from companies like Meta and Tinder was driven by a desire to apply powerful technology where it could give people back their most valuable asset: time.
The article, from Entrepreneur, is part of the "Restaurant Influencers" series, which is sponsored by Toast, a restaurant point-of-sale system, and PepsiCo Foodservice.
